Makes you wonder if this is just restricted to the one hospital !!

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-investigate-nhs-waiting-list-fiddle-0skjz03rt?shareToken=9b3148be41ddfe207c14ef73011774a0

Police are investigating allegations that an NHS hospital fiddled waiting times to meet targets.

 

NHS counter-fraud agents are also looking into claims that bosses manipulated computer systems to hide the extent of long waits.

 

Dozens of patients are known to have been harmed, including one who suffered loss of sight, and hundreds are still waiting for surgery after more than a year.

 

Kettering General Hospital accepts that waiting lists were wrongly reported but insists this was an IT error rather than a deliberate cover-up.

 

 

Human and/or IT errors.... ready made excuses.

However, David Phelan, a former surgery man- ager at Kettering and now a governor of the hospital, said that officially reported waiting times were “based on a lie”.

 

Hospitals are told to make sure that 92 per cent of patients are given routine operations, such as hip replacements, within 18 weeks. Mr Phelan claims that bosses were so obsessed with hitting the target that they asked for databases to be programmed to exclude patients who had waited for more than a year and those who had not been in touch for six months.

 

 

If this does turn out to be true (that is the manipulation of the waiting times was intentional) what should be the punishment?

Do Hospitals generally use different software to manage waiting lists? Are other hospitals having the same problems?

Is it true that shorter waiting lists attract bonuses and for whom?

Can we really afford to do away with targets? It is one way we, the general public, can gauge the health of our hospitals - although, in truth, we don't get much choice when it comes to treatment.

Being found out misleading or lying is, to me, far greater a cause for concern than simply telling the truth, however bad. Once trust is lost, it is rarely regained.