CANCER patients seeking the latest life-saving therapies in Scotland are being frozen out of waiting-time guarantees while health boards decide if they will pay for the treatment.
Sufferers can wait weeks to hear if they can have a drug that is not routinely funded by the NHS – but The Herald has learned managers can wipe out this delay when they report their waiting-times figures. A file leaked to this newspaper also shows waiting-times data is adjusted to filter out delays caused by the failure of diagnostic tests and clinicians changing their minds about how a patient should be treated.
This new insight into the management of waiting-times results has emerged in the wake of the NHS Lothian scandal in which figures were fiddled in a bid to hit Scottish Government targets.
When the SNP was elected in 2007 it promised to bring more transparency to waiting-times information. The party set up a system where every patient referred to hospital has a ticking clock, monitoring how long it takes them to get treated. These clocks, however, can be frozen, reset or turned back if, for example, a patient fails to turn up for an appointment.
NHS staff who monitor waiting times,
called trackers, can check with a central team when they are unsure if they should make an adjustment. Last year, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde was permitted to adjust the clocks of patients who had applied for "off-protocol" drugs, saying they processed applications within 20 days.
Separately, NHS Fife was told it could remove the time it took to agree to fund the best treatment for kidney tumours.
Trackers have also been advised they can adjust figures when a diagnostic examination has failed so the data appears as if the test never happened.
Labour MSP Jackie Baillie said: "The more you dig, the more you discover the manipulation and fiddling of figures would appear to now be endemic across the NHS."
She added: "Audit Scotland's waiting-times investigation, with the support of PricewaterhouseCoopers, has delayed its report due to the complexity of the figures and delays in getting them from health boards. No wonder they're reluctant to provide information: the SNP claimed hidden waiting lists don't exist. They do and here is proof."
A Scottish Government spokesman said: "Cancer treatments are often complex and it is right we respect a patient's wish to consider their treatment options, including special requests for unlicensed medicines.
"The patient's treatment time clock is stopped to allow them to undertake their preferred treatment. However, this also means they can return to the original treatment programme should they wish."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article