Cancelled operations not being recorded, BBC finds

According to figures obtained by the BBC, tens of thousands of operations were cancelled by English hospitals in 2015, but were not officially recorded.

The BBC submitted a Freedom of Information (FoI) request to 156 NHS trusts in England, to provide figures for operations cancelled one to three days before a patient was due to be admitted.

Currently, hospitals must note the cancellation of an operation on the day of admission, but not prior.

Official NHS England figures show about 7.7 million planned operations were carried out in England last year, with 71,370 last-minute cancellations.

Of the 74 trusts which responded to the FoI, data showed they had cancelled 41,474 operations within three day period - compared with 33,400 recorded for the same trusts in the official figures.

In the case of a last-minute cancellation, where the operation is called off either on the day the patient was meant to arrive, after they had arrived or on the day the operation was meant to take place, NHS rules say a patient should be offered a new date within 28 days.

If the deadline is missed, hospitals are not paid for the operation.

The main reasons behind cancellations appeared to be a lack of beds, ward space and staff shortages.

Saffron Cordery, director of policy and strategy at NHS Providers, said: "There are many reasons why operations are cancelled at short notice. Some of these may be due to poor scheduling and a lack of effective planning, but this is very often not the case.

"Increasingly, we are hearing from NHS trusts that it is often down to a more general lack of availability of critical care beds and a lack of anaesthetists and surgeons.

"It is also often down to ever increasing emergency cases requiring theatre time that exceeds level of demand that has been expected."

Meanwhile, Katherine Murphy, chief executive of the Patients' Association, said: "You can't underestimate the upset for them, their family, their friends and everybody else if an operation is cancelled. We are talking about individuals who are often in pain or suffering.

"They will have made lots of arrangements. It can have a huge psychological or financial impact on people."

An NHS England spokeswoman argued: "The proportion of patients seeing their operations cancelled at the last minute remains under one per cent in spite of record numbers of operations being scheduled.

"Our national data collection rightly requires trusts to focus on monitoring the number of last-minute cancellations, as this is where the most distress is caused for patients. Hospitals should continue to ensure that every effort is made to reschedule cancelled operations as soon as possible."