Appointment Terms

Our approach

We believe in building our relationship with you on mutual trust and respect. Life is unpredictable — people get ill, meetings overrun, plans change. This page explains how we handle bookings, payments and cancellations, and what your rights are.

New patient bookings

To secure your very first appointment with us, we ask for payment in advance at the time of booking. If you book online, you pay as part of the booking. If you book by telephone, we will take payment over the phone during the call. We have designed this to be as fair as possible should your plans change:

• Full refund — available if you cancel or reschedule with at least 24 hours’ notice.

• One-time transfer — if you need to change your appointment with less than 24 hours’ notice, our own terms do not offer a refund, but we are happy to transfer your payment to one rescheduled appointment.

If the rescheduled appointment is also missed, or cancelled at short notice, we cannot transfer the payment a second time.

These are our own terms. Where they differ from your legal rights, your legal rights come first.

Follow-up appointments

Once you are an established patient, we no longer require payment in advance, unless you book online — see below. Our approach for ongoing care is based on two-way commitment:

• Your commitment to us — to help us keep our schedule fair for everyone and our fees as low as possible, we ask for at least 24 hours’ notice if you need to cancel or reschedule. This allows us to offer that time to another patient who may be waiting for urgent treatment.

• Our commitment to flexibility — unlike many clinics, we do not routinely penalise our patients for occasional late cancellations or missed appointments. We understand that life happens, and we prefer to focus on your care rather than fees.

If missed appointments become a pattern

While we are happy to be flexible for the occasional change, we must also protect our practitioners’ time. If missing appointments or late cancellations becomes a repeated pattern, we will unfortunately have to consider moving you to our Cancellation Fee Terms for future bookings. Under those terms, if you miss an appointment, or cancel or reschedule it at short notice — less than 24 hours — we will ask you to pay the fee for that appointment. If you had already paid for it, we will keep that payment. If that payment has been refunded to you, the fee will be payable before we book your next appointment.

Before we move anyone to Cancellation Fee Terms, we will write to you, explain what we have noticed, and ask if there is a reasonable adjustment that we can make which might make it easier for you to attend your appointments. For example, if your schedule repeatedly conflicts with your clinician’s schedule, we can try to move you over to a different clinician whose schedule might be more compatible.

Where missed appointments are connected to a disability or a health condition, we will not move you to Cancellation Fee Terms without first discussing adjustments with you and giving them a chance to work.

The Cancellation Fee Terms are not meant to be punitive. Our goal is simply to ensure we can continue providing consistent, high-quality care to our entire community at an affordable price.

When we will not charge a fee. If we are able to offer your appointment time to someone else, there is nothing to charge for and we will not charge you. We will also consider waiving the cancellation fee where you could not reasonably have let us know — sudden illness, a bereavement, a hospital admission, a caring emergency, or serious travel disruption. We may ask you to tell us what happened. In deciding, we look at the circumstances and whether we were able to use the appointment time.

Booking again. Where a cancellation fee is outstanding, we will normally ask for it to be settled before we book your next appointment. If an appointment is booked online while a fee is outstanding, we will contact you about it — and if it is not settled, we may cancel that appointment and refund what you have paid for it. We will not do either of those things while you have told us you think a charge is wrong and we are looking into it.

Furthermore, this is not permanent. We review every patient on Cancellation Fee Terms every six months and, if you have attended reliably, we move you back to our standard terms.

Booking online

All online bookings are paid in full at the time of booking, including for patients we already know. This is to keep appointment times from being taken speculatively and left empty.

Every online booking is then checked by our team to make sure the appointment type is right for you. If anything looks wrong, we will contact you.

How to cancel

The easiest way is the cancellation link in your appointment confirmation email. It works at any time, right up to your appointment, and you will get an email confirming the cancellation.

If you paid in advance, we will call you to arrange your refund or your new appointment, in line with the terms above.

You can also call us on 0161 509 7729, email reception@innatehealthcare.co.uk, use the contact form on our website, or use the cancellation form at the bottom of this page. Any clear message telling us you want to cancel is enough — you do not need to use particular wording.

Your right to change your mind

If you booked without visiting us in person, you have a legal right to cancel within 14 days of booking and receive a full refund, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. This applies whatever notice you give, and runs until your appointment has taken place or the 14 days are up, whichever comes first.

These rights are separate from our own terms and take precedence over them.

If we have to cancel

We will tell you as soon as we can and offer the earliest suitable alternative. If you have paid in advance you can choose a full refund or a new appointment, whichever suits you.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, or you think we have got something wrong, please tell us. Call 0161 509 7729 or email reception@innatehealthcare.co.uk. Our Complaints page explains what to do if we do not resolve it.

Cancellation form

You do not have to use this form — telling us in any clear way is enough. It is here because the law requires us to provide one.

To: MAAR Healthcare Services Ltd, trading as Innate Healthcare, 120 Union Street, Oldham, OL1 1DU
reception@innatehealthcare.co.uk · 0161 509 7729

I hereby give notice that I cancel my contract for the following appointment:

• Appointment date and time:
• Date booked:
• Your name:
• Your address:
• Today’s date:
• Signature (only if sending this form on paper):

Send this by email

The button opens your own email app with this form ready to send. You can also print this page, or just call us on 0161 509 7729.