Rammya Mathew: Long and uncertain waiting times are leading to poorer health outcomes

There are certain questions I really hope patients don’t ask me these days in general practice. One is, “When is my hospital appointment going to be?” Quite reasonably, patients expect that when we make a referral to secondary care we’ll have a rough idea of when they might be seen. Nine times out of 10, this just isn’t the case. Either no appointments are available when we make the referral, or internal triage at the hospital makes it almost impossible to give patients an accurate answer. Nowadays, even if I do know the answer, it’s probably not what they’re hoping to hear.Previously we could have quoted the 18 week referral to treatment time, but only 60% of services currently meet this.1 This is partly due to a longstanding mismatch in capacity and demand, which the pandemic has exacerbated further. To put this into context, 4.7 million people were on an…
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