Downing Street Says » Cancelled Operations

» Wednesday, March 2, 2005

Cancelled Operations

Asked if the Prime Minister had had any further investigations raised into the case raised by Michael Howard at PMQs regarding cancelled operations, the PMOS said it was better that individual local cases were dealt with at local level. The PMOS said it was important to note that the proportion of cancelled operations had varied very little over the years. As a proportion of the total number of cancelled operation in 1996/7 was 1.1%, and in 2003/4 it was 1.2%. In 2001/2, there had been a fluctuation, where it rose to 1.5%. However, in April 2002, the Government took action, by guaranteeing that patients whose surgery had been cancelled on the day would be admitted within 28 days. This now seemed to be working, as figures taken from the first half of 2004/5 showed that 90% of patients whose surgery had been cancelled were being re-admitted within the 28-day period. In terms of absolute numbers, there had been an increase, but that was inevitable as there had been 450,000 this year more operations than there were in 1997.

Put to him that 1.1% to 1.2% was still an increase that was still "hundreds if not thousands of cancelled operations" that were still a problem, the PMOS said that no-one was pretending it was not an issue. It was an issue that should be kept in perspective in terms of a health service which was doing the vast number of operations that it was doing, and in which there had been an increase of nearly half a million extra operations being done. To define a health service solely by the number of cancelled operations was to ignore the fact that there was a health service where there were many more operations being done.

1 Comment »

I have heard that there was MUCH more cancelled operations last year.
Comment by John C. — 10 Jun 2005 on 4:18 pm | Link

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