Executive accused of fiddling patient figures

THE Scottish Executive has been accused of fiddling figures after it emerged that a record number of patients have been excluded from waiting-times lists.

More than 4,000 new patients were not added to the official list for waiting times over a three-month period - a 53 per cent increase on the same period the previous year.

Patients are not counted in figures for waiting times if they cannot have an operation for personal or medical reasons or if their treatment is considered a low clinical priority, such as a tattoo removal.

But the rise in the number of such patients, who are given availability status codes (ASCs) justifying their omission from the list, has raised questions about the trustworthiness of waiting-times figures.

Opposition politicians have also seized on the fact that the number of new patients with ASCs reached an all-time high last December, when the Executive’s target to guarantee in-patient treatment within nine months came into force.

In the quarter leading to the end of December, 4,293 new patients were given ASCs compared to 2,808 patients the year before. There are now more than 28,947 patients with ASCs in Scotland, some of which date back more than two years.

Shona Robison, the SNP’s health spokeswoman said: "The Executive has already been caught once fiddling the waiting-list figures and it looks like they’re at it again.

"There are cases, either due to secondary conditions or personal circumstances, where waiting-time guarantees are not appropriate, but the minister will now have to explain why over 4,000 patients were excluded from their pledge.

"They were under pressure to meet an election pledge and it now looks suspiciously like we have discovered how they managed it. The record number of patients excluded from a waiting-time guarantee came at the most convenient moment possible for ministers. It allowed them to meet a pledge they had looked like missing by a mile. Frankly this stinks."

Last week, the British Medical Association also criticised the relevance of certain politically driven targets.

Simon Williams, the policy director of the Patients’ Association, said: "There are certainly pressures on meeting targets and the NHS is a politically controlled organisation and politicians put pressure on managers to perform.

"The NHS is used as a political football and bounced around by politicians for their own ends. This damages the confidence that patients have in the NHS as well as staff morale and I think that the public is often suspicious when the NHS comes out with performance figures."

The health watchdog Audit Scotland recently warned that hospitals in Scotland were failing to meet six-year-old targets for the number of day-case operations they should be carrying out and that if these had been met an extra 5,700 cases would be dealt with each year.

The number of patients waiting for in-patient treatment in Scotland has risen by more than 3,000 in the space of a year, according to the latest figures.

As of December 112,022 patients were waiting for hospital treatment with the number of patients added to the waiting list during that quarter at 57,644 - an all-time high.

The SNP said that this increase may be due to the fact that out-patient appointments had been put back during previous quarters, delaying decisions on whether operations were needed, and thus easing pressure on an in-patient backlog enabling the nine-month targets for treatment to be met.

A spokesman for the Scottish Executive denied that the public had been misled and said that the reason why patients with an ASC had increased was due to the abolition of the deferred waiting list - where patients had no guarantee for treatment - in April last year.

He said: "Patients are now on a single waiting list, with an availability status code giving a clear indication why they have not received treatment within the waiting-time guarantee.

"Nearly 90 per cent of ASCs are patient-driven - people who could not attend for personal or social reasons, who did not attend their appointment or who have a medical condition which prevents treatment.

"Those NHS board chief executives whose hospitals recorded an increase in ASCs have provided the health department with a written assurance that ASCs have been applied appropriately and in line with national guidance."