PhD student profile - Nazila Mousavi
Thesis title: Reducing the impact of no-shows in healthcare by data-driven patient scheduling
Year of registration:
2023
Nationality:
Iranian/British
Name of supervisor:
Professor Sanja Petrovic and Professor Juergen Branke
Department:
Operations Management and Information Systems
Primary funding:
Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
Contact email:
Nazila.Mousavi@nottingham.ac.uk
Research summary
Nazila's research explores missed GP appointments, commonly known as no-shows, which place a significant burden on National Health Service (NHS) primary care. Beyond wasted clinical time, they delay access to care for other patients and contribute to inefficient use of already stretched resources. This research addresses the problem directly,developing a practical, data-driven approach to appointment scheduling that accounts for the likelihood of a patient not attending.
The study is conducted in partnership with an NHS GP surgery in Nottingham, using a dataset of over 56,000 real appointments. A machine learning model is built to predict no-show risk at the individual patient level, drawing on factors such as appointment timing, lead time, and patient history.
The model is evaluated under realistic conditions to reflect how it would function in day-to-day clinical use. The predicted risk is then embedded into the scheduling process, where a wide range of booking policies are compared and assessed using a simulation of a full year of surgery operations. This allows for a thorough and realistic evaluation of how different scheduling approaches perform in practice.
The overall aim is to produce recommendations that are both evidence-based and genuinely usable,offering NHS surgeries a clearer path to managing no-shows without compromising the quality of patient care.
Conference papers
- Mousavi, N. (2026) ‘Patient no-show prediction in primary care: systematic experimentation across algorithms and validation approaches’, in *Tri-Campus and PhD Conference*, 24 April.
Awards received
- The Best PhD Paper Awards ,Tri-Campus and PhD Conference , 24th April 2026
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