NHS accused of misleading the public over A&E waiting times
THE NHS has been accused of presenting Accident & Emergency statistics in a way that could “mislead” the public after trusts were told to change the way they report their data.
The UK Statistics Authority has written to health officials demanding explanations about the way performance against a target to treat A&E patients within four hours is being recorded.
It has highlighted a letter from watchdogs NHS Improvement which told trusts to start including statistics from local walk-in centres – even if they were not run by the hospital, or on their site – in figures measuring their A&E performance. The changes, following instructions in October, mean some trusts appear to have made major improvements in A&E performance, when in fact their waits are just as long.
As a result, United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS trust was able to say that 82 per cent of patients were treated within four hours in December.
However, if performance of local walk-in centres had not been included, the figure would have been just 69.5 per cent, analysis shows. Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation trust saw a similar boost in performance, with a result of 85.5 per cent published, instead of the 73.4 per cent it would have achieved without adding in results from Corby Urgent Care Centre, run by GPS eight miles away.
NHS Improvement said the letter was designed to address variation in the way A&E activity was reported, and ensure consistency. An NHS Improvement spokesman said: “This change was not intended to artificially inflate A&E performance figures.”
A&E figures for November show a marginal deterioration compared with performance in October. An NHS mapping exercise for December which was supposed to track the changes suggests national A&E performance would have been the same – at 85.1 per cent – regardless of the changes in the way data was recorded.
However, analysis suggests flaws in the published data, because of the failure properly to record extra activity from walk-in centres. For example, monthly NHS figures show that University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust treated 78.6 per cent of A&E patients within four hours in September, whereas the figure was 85.5 per cent in October. Those changes came after a more than doubling in the number of patients counted from minor injury units, after figures from the City of Coventry Walk In Centre, run by Virgin Care, were added to the data.
However, the NHS mapping exercise carried out a few weeks later does not show additional activity for the trust.
In the letter to NHS England, Ed Humpherson, the director general for regulation at the UK Statistics Authority, tells health officials that the impact of changes to recording practice needs to be clearer. “This will support better decision making and avoid users reaching misleading conclusions,” it warns.