Shropshire patients ‘will be treated in 18 weeks’
Wednesday 9th November 2011, 10:59AM GMT.
No patient in Shropshire should have to wait longer than 18 weeks between referral and treatment from April next year thanks to a £3m cash boost.
The county’s two NHS primary care trusts announced today they are to spend the extra money this year to clear a backlog of cases.
The money, part of a £9 million package, will pay for a range of measures including reducing waiting times for patients from April 1, 2012.
A meeting of NHS Telford and Wrekin was told yesterday that they continued to under perform in meeting the 18-week target, which, although not a legal requirement, is set out as a ‘right’ for all patients in the NHS constitution.
The trusts have a target of dealing with 90 per cent of inpatients and 95 per cent of outpatients within 18 weeks. A report said that in July, 64 per cent of inpatients and nearly 89 per cent of outpatients were dealt with within that time.
Steve Jarman Davies, the PCT’s director of commissioning intelligence, said part of the problem was shifting a backlog of cases.
‘Only this week 1,000 oral surgery patients were identified as needing treatment when the previous figure had been approximately 100,’ the report added.
Mr Jarman Davies said after the meeting that the money would cover the backlog for Shropshire County PCT and NHS Telford and Wrekin and treat approximately 13,000 outpatients and 1,300 inpatients.
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I have never understood the wait anyway.
If I have a backlog of work I work harder to get on top of it so that the next jobs are handled as soon as they come in. Yet the NHS always have a backlog that they never work to remove.
For example smear test results always take around 6 weeks to be returned. Why not make effort to work through the backlog and all results would then be returned in less than 7 days?
Are there any jobs (excluding the urgent) that are done in reasonable time?
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