Waiting list at hospital slashed by 60 weeks

THE waiting list for one department of Liverpool University Hospitals has been cut by 60 weeks since March last year.

Across Merseyside, Halton and West Lancashire, 20 hospital departments fail to give patients their first specialist appointment within the NHS’s 18-week target for starting consultant-led treatment, according to the latest data from My Planned Care.

Hospital trusts across the country submit data to My Planned Care, an NHS website where waiting times for each department at each hospital trust are displayed and updated each week.

The waiting times are for elective waiting lists, not emergency or critical care, or waiting lists for cancer patients who are supposed to be seen by a specialist within two weeks of a referral.

The figure displayed for each department is the average waiting time for all patients.

The actual waiting time for each patient will vary depending on the clinical urgency of their case, so they may wait for less or more time than the average.

When average waiting times were shared on My Planned Care for the first time in March, one department at Liverpool University Hospitals had one of the top ten longest average waiting times for treatment of any department in NHS trusts in the country.

At the time, patients would wait an average of 82 weeks – more than one and a half years – for upper gastrointestinal surgery. Now, the average waiting time for treatment at that department is 22 weeks. It doesn’t even rank in the top 10 in Merseyside.

Out of all the departments at Merseyside hospital trusts, the longest wait is for ear, nose and throat services at Liverpool University Hospitals, with an average waiting time of 31 weeks for an initial appointment.

Departments at Southport and Ormskirk

Hospital, and St Helens and Knowsley Hospitals, had the shortest waiting times.

Patients might wait for just over a month for an initial appointment for haematology, ophthalmology, orhtopaedics and oral surgery at these trusts, and they could wait just a few weeks longer for treatment to begin.

NHS patients have a right to start consultant-led treatment within 18 weeks of a GP referral. If their treatment won’t start within this timeframe, patients have a ‘Right to Choose’ to be treated at another NHS hospital trust, or by a private provider paid for by the NHS.

For cancer patients, this rule applies if they won’t be seen by a specialist within two weeks of a referral.

Although waiting times remain above target in many specialities across the region’s hospitals, the significant drop for some departments in the last nine months, and the short waits in some hospitals, will be welcome news at a time when staff shortages, patients being treated in corridors, hours-long waits for ambulances, and strikes by health workers are dominating the news.

One regional initiative to clear the backlog of cases built up during the Covid-19 pandemic is the Theatres Improvement Project, which has seen 19,000 more people in Cheshire and Merseyside receive operations in the last 12 months than in the year before.

This is thanks to the use of dashboards and tools to maximise the use of operating theatres and improve booking and scheduling procedures.

Two local hospitals – Liverpool Women’s and Liverpool Heart and Chest – are now in the top 10% nationally in terms of theatre utilisation.

Dr Sinead Clarke, associate medical director for system quality and improvement at Cheshire and Merseyside Integrated Care System, said: “This project has been instrumental in providing quicker access to surgical procedures for thousands of patients in Cheshire and Merseyside.”