PA warns over rising number of cancelled operations

The Patients Association has published a report raising concern over the thousands of patients which have had their operations cancelled on the day of their scheduled surgery.

The report, Feeling The Wait, cautioned that cancelling an operation could lead to placing a ‘significant psychological burden’ on patients. It cited a lack of beds and scheduling errors as the main excuses given to patients for the reason behind their cancelled operations.

Official figures showed that there was an average of 3,269 cancelled operations in England during 2015.

The report also highlighted an increase in the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for routine operations. Data showed the number of patients waiting for over 18 weeks for elective surgical procedures rose from 51,3888 in 2014, to 92,739 in 2015.

Katherine Murphy, Patients Association chief executive, commented: “The Patients Association has noticed a clear, trend over recent years in the increasing time people are waiting for operations, as well as the number of people waiting longer for elective surgery.”

“Every day we hear from the people behind these statistics on our national helpline: individuals who are in pain, worried they will lose further mobility, or will take longer to recover when they finally get their surgery. Their family members and carers are also having to share the added uncertainty and pressure faced by patients whilst they are waiting for their operations.

"Overall, with the significant jump in waiting times, we are very concerned that relaxing the rules on waiting time targets as recently reported, will only exacerbate an already unacceptable situation for patients.

"From the patient's perspective, nothing positive can come from taking away NHS targets - it just means people could be waiting even longer as there will be little incentive for NHS providers to focus on efficiency."

However, an NHS England spokesman argued: "We have significant concerns about this report which is both misleading and statistically flawed and is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the referral-to-treatment performance standard. Waits for an NHS operation remain close to an all-time low - down from a maximum wait of 18 months over a decade ago to 18 weeks now, with the average wait less than 10 weeks.

"Last month more than nine out of 10 patients were waiting less than 18 weeks to start consultant-led treatment. We continue to make strides in cutting long waits, with the number of patients waiting over a year slashed from over 5,000 recorded in March 2012 to being in the hundreds now.

"In the last five years, since June 2011, the NHS has reduced the number of patients waiting more than a year for treatment by over 12,000."