A no-show policy you can actually hand to a patient
Most clinic policies are written to be defensible rather than read. This one is short enough to put in a booking confirmation, and it leaves every number blank — because the fee, the notice period and whether you may charge at all are decisions for your clinic and its advisers, not for a template.
A policy only works if the patient saw it before the appointment
Almost every dispute about a missed appointment is really a dispute about whether the patient knew. So the most useful thing you can do with the text below is not to display it on a wall — it is to put one line of it in the booking confirmation, where it is read, and keep the full version somewhere you can point to. Say it once at booking, once in the reminder, and never for the first time in the invoice.
Three versions, for three places
Square brackets are yours to fill or delete. If you decide not to charge anything, the policy still works — say so plainly, because a policy with no consequence is clearer than a vague threat.
One line, for the booking confirmation
If you can't make it, tell us at least [hours] hours before and we'll move it free of charge. [Missed appointments without notice may be charged [amount].]
A short paragraph, for the website
We hold your appointment time for you alone. If you need to change or cancel it, please give us at least [hours] hours' notice — you can reply to any of our messages to do it. With notice, there is no charge and we will offer you the next suitable time. Without notice, [we may charge [amount] / there is no charge, but repeated missed appointments may affect how far ahead we can book you].
What to say when it happens
Hello [name] — we kept [day] at [time] free and didn't see you. No problem if something came up. Would you like me to book the next available time? [As a reminder, our policy is [hours] hours' notice.]
The decisions this template deliberately leaves to you
Whether you may charge for a missed appointment, how much, and what notice you must give before the policy applies are not the same questions in any two countries — and where someone else pays for the care, that payer usually has rules of its own. Those are the three things this page will not fill in for you. Decide them with whoever advises your practice, write them once, and then keep the wording identical everywhere it appears: a policy that says twenty-four hours on the website and forty-eight in the confirmation is the one you will lose an argument over.
This is a drafting aid, not legal advice, and the examples are jurisdiction-neutral on purpose. Have your own adviser check the version you publish.
Questions
Should we charge for missed appointments at all?
That is a question for your clinic and its advisers, and in some places and some payer arrangements the answer is no. A policy with no fee still does useful work: it sets an expectation, gives a notice period, and gives your team something to point at.
How much notice should we ask for?
Long enough that you can offer the slot to someone else, which for most clinics means the working day before rather than a fixed number of hours. A notice period you cannot actually use is just a number in a document.
Where should the policy appear?
In the booking confirmation and again in the reminder, in the same words. A policy that only lives on a website page is one most patients will never have read, and that is exactly the argument you do not want to be having.
Can Morasel send this automatically?
The one-line version fits inside a booking confirmation or a reminder, both of which Morasel sends on a schedule. The longer version is for your website or your intake form — Morasel does not publish policy pages for you.
Say it where it gets read
Put the one-line version in the confirmation and the reminder, and see the other ways clinics keep slots filled.