What do you consider to be a reasonable time to wait for NHS treatment?  1 week, 1 month, 1 year?  Do you actually know what the national targets are for waiting times with the NHS?  We all have different ideas about how long we should wait for treatment.  In an ideal world we would be seen immediately we report to our GP.  Unfortunately this is a very rare occurrence. 

If you need to contact your GP you should be able to speak to or see someone for advice within two working days.  Now I don’t know about you, but very rarely if ever does this happen at my GPs practice.  Even if you do get to speak to someone it may not be your GP, it could be a nurse or indeed someone else.

What if my GP refers me for treatment at an outpatient department?  How long can I expect to wait to be seen?  According to the national target, by the end of this year 2005, you should not have to wait more than 26 weeks from the time your GP refers you till you get an appointment.  It also states that by the end of 2007 you should wait no longer than 18 weeks.  It may well be that your Local Health Care Co-operative (LHCC) insists that it is meeting if not bettering these targets, but as with most of the statistics within the NHS, these figures have been ‘doctored’.

In some departments your GP referral is received and you are put on the waiting list.  Depending on staffing levels and volume of referrals your initial waiting time could be anywhere from 2 weeks to 9 weeks and if you are very unfortunate, even longer.  At this point when you would expect to receive an appointment for treatment, you don’t.  Instead you receive a letter stating that you have now reached the top of the waiting list and if you still want an appointment you should contact the department.  You then have to ring them and you will be given an appointment.  You then attend a triage clinic. 

This is for assessment only.  At this assessment the clinician will ‘prioritise’ you.  You could be assessed and then discharged, put on a routine waiting list or moved further up the waiting list as a priority.  If you are not discharged at this point you are put on another waiting list.  This is where the NHS ‘doctor’ the figures.  Once you have been seen at a triage clinic, you are no longer classed as being on the waiting list, even though from this point you can wait, from my own personal experience, up to 22 weeks before you are appointed for treatment. 

When you eventually reach the top of the second waiting list, you still don’t get an appointment for treatment.  You are sent yet another letter stating that you are at the top of the waiting list and if you still require treatment you should telephone for an appointment.  Another telephone call later, you finally have an appointment to attend for treatment. 

You would think that after going through all that palaver, you would be desperate to attend your appointment.  Unfortunately this is not always the case.  Many people fail to attend for their appointments.  This in turn increases waiting times for everyone else.  Those wasted appointments could have been filled by people who need them and who want to be treated.  On average between 100 and 160 patients fail to attend outpatient appointments every month. 

Other departments within the NHS also have national targets that should be met such as:

There are national targets for many other departments, but I doubt many of them will be able to reach and maintain the targets expected.  The NHS is in the red by hundreds of millions of pounds so there is now way that they can invest more money in improving the systems already in place.  Indeed in the majority of NHS trusts departments and indeed full hospitals are being closed. 

This can only lead to the resources we have in place being stretched even further.  We can help to reduce the strain that is being put on the NHS by looking after ourselves as best we can and most importantly, by keeping appointments that we are given.