Wes Streeting – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Wes Streeting on 2016-07-21.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many NHS trusts failed to provide data on referral to treatment times in each year since May 2010.

Mr Philip Dunne

Patients have a legal right, set out in the NHS Constitution, to start consultant-led treatment within a maximum of 18 weeks from referral for non-urgent conditions.

Since May 2010, performance has been measured against one or more of the following operational standards:

― 92% of patients who have not yet started treatment should have been waiting within 18 weeks from referral (the incomplete pathway standard, introduced from April 2012 and the current measure of performance).

― 90% of patients admitted to hospital should have started consultant-led treatment within 18 weeks from referral (the admitted pathway standard, introduced from April 2008 and abolished in practice from June 2015 and in legislation in October 2015).

― 95% of non-admitted patients (outpatients or patients on pathways that end without treatment) should have started consultant-led treatment within 18 weeks from referral (the non-admitted pathway standard, introduced from April 2008 and abolished in practice from June 2015 and in legislation in October 2015).

To monitor performance against these standards, organisations that provide NHS services that fall within the scope of referral to treatment, including NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts, are required to submit a monthly return to NHS England. Admitted and non-admitted data are still collected but are no longer used for monitoring against standards.

The NHS Standard Contract includes a comprehensive requirement on providers to submit all nationally-mandated datasets. However, from time to time trusts need to implement new IT systems and temporarily suspend submissions of data for technical reasons.

The following table shows the number of NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts that did not report referral to treatment data in one or more months in each financial year from 2010-11.

Table: number¹ of NHS trusts² and NHS foundation trusts² that did not report referral to treatment data in one or more months of each financial year from 2010-11

Source: NHS England, consultant-led referral to treatment waiting times

Notes:

1. Table shows the total number of different trusts not reporting data in a year and not the maximum number of trusts not reporting in anyone month.
2. The same trust could have been a non-reporter in more than one month.
3. Tameside Hospital NHS Foundation Trust did not report February 2014 non-admitted data in 2013-14. The data was submitted in a later revision to the dataset.
4. Each year is April to May. Two trusts that did not report incomplete pathways data in April 2010 also did not report data in some subsequent months of 2010-11.