The phone rings at 10:20. You are debriding a heel, ten minutes into a treatment, with another patient already in the waiting room. The call rings out. By the time you check the phone at lunch, there is no voicemail and no way of knowing who it was. Most clinicians shrug this off as one lost appointment. It is usually worth a lot more than that.

Why a new patient is not one fee

Think about how podiatry actually works. Very little of it is one-off.

  • Routine nail care runs on a rhythm: every six or eight weeks, year round.
  • A diabetic patient needs regular checks, on a schedule, indefinitely.
  • A biomechanics patient comes back for reviews, adjustments, new orthoses.
  • A happy patient brings their partner, their mum, their neighbour with the bad toe.

So the person who rang at 10:20 was not calling to buy one appointment. They were auditioning a clinic they might attend for years. When the call rang out, the audition moved to the next clinic on Google, and they liked them fine.

The sum, in your numbers

Placeholder figures, deliberately. Swap in your own; the shape of the sum is the point.

Say your appointment fee is £45.
Say a routine patient visits 8 times a year.

One patient = £360 a year. Not £45.

Say one new-patient call a week rings out mid-treatment.
52 weeks x £360 = around £18,000 a year of recurring care,
booked into the next clinic's diary instead of yours.

Not our numbers and not a promise. Your fee might be higher, your visit rhythm different, your missed calls fewer or worse. That is exactly why the tally below matters: the sum only becomes true when your own numbers go into it.

Why clinics miss more calls than they think

A solo or small clinic has an honest structural problem: the hours when patients ring are the hours you are treating. You cannot answer with a patient in the chair. Part-time reception cover rarely lines up with when the phone actually goes. Nobody is being lazy. The diary itself is the reason the phone rings out.

The other half of the problem: new patients mostly will not leave a voicemail. Someone with a painful ingrown toenail wants it sorted this week. A dead line or a beep does not get their name. The next clinic's answered phone does.

Do this today, all free

  • Start a fortnight's tally. Every call that rings out during treatment hours goes on a note by the desk. Two weeks of truth beats a year of guessing.
  • Set a missed-call auto-text on the clinic number: "Sorry we missed you, we are with a patient. Text your name and number and we will call you back today." It catches the callers who would never leave a voicemail.
  • Put your online booking link where patients actually look. If you use Cliniko, its booking page is included in what you already pay: put the link on your Google Business Profile today. Every patient who books themselves is a call that cannot ring out.

When the tally comes back ugly

If two weeks of tallying says the leak is real, you have two honest options. Reception cover, if the call volume justifies a wage. Or a receptionist system that answers every call and books your real diary. We build the second kind, on Cliniko itself. Even so, we would want the tally before recommending anything. Sometimes the honest answer is that the free steps above already closed the gap.

Run the fortnight's tally, then bring it along with your appointment fee. We will size the leak against your actual diary in twenty minutes. If the number says "do nothing more", that is what we will tell you.