Two problems that cancel each other out.

Last Minute Clinic is a marketplace for private, self-pay healthcare appointments that have just come free. A clinic releases a cancelled slot, we work out which waiting patients it actually suits, and they hear about it by text and email within minutes. The first person to claim it holds it for five minutes while they pay.

We are not a booking directory and we don't sell leads. Nothing is listed here that isn't a real, empty appointment at a verified clinic.

An empty chair costs a clinic the whole fee and costs a patient another fortnight of waiting. Late cancellations are the most predictable waste in private healthcare and the hardest for any single practice to solve, because refilling a slot at two hours' notice means someone has to phone a list.

Matching is the part we take seriously. We use what you tell us about the care you need, how far you'll travel and how much notice you can work with, so being notified means the appointment is genuinely worth your time.

Clinics pay a 10% commission on the slots they actually fill. There is no setup fee and no subscription on either side. Patients pay the clinic's price plus a £3 buyer protection fee, which covers holding the payment until after the appointment has happened.

Only licensed UK private providers can list. Before a clinic can release a single appointment we check its regulator registration, photographs of the premises and its accreditation documents. Payment is held in escrow until 24 hours after the appointment, and either side can flag a problem to freeze the payout.

We are not an emergency service and we have no connection to the NHS. If it's urgent, call 111, and 999 in an emergency.

Last Minute Clinic is built by Angeli Zhao and Kemi Adeyemo. We're two students at the London School of Economics, and before that we worked in investment banking — jobs where a cancelled meeting gets refilled within the hour, because an empty diary slot is money lost. It struck us that private healthcare doesn't work like that at all. A clinic can have a cancellation at 9am, an empty chair at 11am and a patient two streets away who has been waiting three weeks for exactly that appointment, and none of them ever find out about each other.

So we built the thing that joins it up. The marketplace instincts come from banking — pricing, matching supply with demand, holding funds safely until both sides are happy — and the patience for regulator checks, clinic paperwork and eighty-question patient journey worksheets comes from being students with more curiosity than sense.

We read every clinic application ourselves and answer our own email. If you write to us, you'll get a reply from Angeli or Kemi, not a ticketing system.