An NHS hospital has been accused of “playing games” with waiting times for cancer examinations, as new figures show that more people are enduring delays before receiving important tests.
By Martin Beckford
11:20PM BST 05 Oct 2011
An NHS hospital has been accused of “playing games” with waiting times for cancer examinations, as new figures show that more people are enduring delays before receiving important tests.
The Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust is telling GPs that if patients cannot attend a specific appointment for cancer checks within the recommended two weeks, they should hold off making the referral.
The tactic could mean that those with suspected tumours have to wait longer before they can be seen by a specialist, but it will stop the hospital missing a government target for carrying out initial cancer tests within a fortnight.
Dr Paul Roblin, the chief executive of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire Local Medical Committee, told the trade magazine Pulse: “This is the perverse effect of targets. People start playing games if targets are likely to be breached.
“If a proportion of patients breach the two-week wait because they can’t attend, then the trust doesn’t like it because it looks bad on their wait statistics. It is a clinical nonsense.”
A spokesman for the trust, which runs the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, said: “Occasionally patients given urgent appointments fail to attend on the day because they are unavailable through family commitments or holidays. This means we cannot see them within the two-week deadline.
“What we are suggesting to GPs is that where a patient knows they will not be able to attend an appointment within the next two weeks, perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer them as soon [as possible] after their previously arranged holiday or family commitment.”
Figures published by the Department of Health yesterday showed an increase in the number of patients waiting longer than the target of six weeks for key tests such as MRI and CAT scans and barium enemas. At the end of August, there were 550,284 people still waiting for diagnostic procedures, including 11,424 who had been on the list longer than the recommended six weeks. This represents a rise of 700 on the previous month and of 5,500 from last year.
