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| - - Official data indicates that, across the Northern, Southern and Western trusts, the number of cases awaiting a first consultant-led appointment in June 2023 was 210,738.
- By June 2024, this number had risen to 230,530 – an increase of 19,792, or 9.4%.
- The Belfast Trust and South Eastern Trust are currently excluded from a lot of official data, which the Department of Health says is down to challenges in gathering and comparing information during the staggered rollout of its new electronic records system.
A Private Members’ Motion debated in the Assembly on 17 September stated:
“That this Assembly acknowledges the deepening crisis engulfing the health service; believes current hospital waiting times are unacceptable and must be urgently and sustainably addressed; notes with particular concern the 9.4% rise in the number of patients waiting for a first consultant-led outpatient appointment in the Northern, Southern and Western Health and Social Care Trusts between June 2023 and June 2024.”
This motion was tabled by DUP MLAs Diane Dodds and Alan Robinson. During the debate, Mrs Dodds said:
“Last year, there was an increase of 9.4% in the number of people waiting for an appointment with a consultant following their referral by a GP. In many specialities, there is a much, much longer waiting time than there is in others. We need to address those issues. They are very, very significant. We have heard for a long time that Northern Ireland has the worst waiting lists in the United Kingdom, but has the approach that we have tried so far brought us any closer to significant progress? We have made progress at the margins, but not significant progress that will help us to address the issue.”
This is slightly different from what is laid out in the motion, which specifically refers to this being true across three of NI’s five geographical health trusts (there is a reason for this – more on that later).
However, given that Mrs Dodds herself tabled the motion it is obvious that she was speaking in reference to what the motion says and therefore meant to exclude the Belfast Trust and South Eastern Trust from this figure (no-one is always 100% precise about every detail when speaking on their feet, and no-one should worry about that too much – good communication is about being clear in context, which is the case here).
But let’s get specific. These figures concern a rise in the number of cases on waiting lists, rather than people (again, as per Mrs Dodds’ words during the debate). These are not the same thing, because one individual person can be referred for multiple appointments about different matters. For more information on that distinction, see this previous fact check. For that reason, it’s better to refer to an increase in cases (or alternatively patients) rather than people. Again, this is Mrs Dodds’ motion so, from the context, her meaning is clear.
For completeness, it’s worth noting that Mr Robinson was extremely precise when discussing this himself:
“Between June 2023 and June 2024, we witnessed a staggering 9.4% increase in the number of patients who are waiting for such appointments across the Northern, Southern and Western Health and Social Care Trusts.”
The real question is this: are these figures accurate? Has the total number of cases waiting for a first consultant-led appointment across those three Trusts jumped by almost 10% in a single year?
The answer is yes.
Official figures from the Department of Health back up these claims. Let’s take a look.
- Sources
FactCheckNI contacted both MLAs about this claim.
Both Mrs Dodds and Mr Robinson pointed us in the direction of Northern Ireland’s Outpatient Waiting Times Statistics, published by the Department of Health and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA).
These figures are published quarterly, with the most recent data released in August and featuring stats that were true as of 30 June this year. The report includes that:
- 230,530 patients were waiting for a first consultant-led outpatient appointment at hospitals in the Northern, Southern and Western HSC Trusts on 30 June 2024, 1.6% (3,810) less than on 31 March 2024 (234,340), and 9.4% (19,792) more than on 30 June 2023 (210,738).
So the most-recent official data fully supports the claim. It is therefore accurate.
- Three trusts?
The data above completes the fact check but this statistic – and, indeed, this Private Members’ Motion – did not occur in a vacuum.
This article will outline some of the wider health context below. However, first of all it’s a good idea to explore why this statistic specifically refers to three of Northern Ireland’s five geographical health trusts: Northern, Western and Southern, while excluding the Belfast and South Eastern trusts.
Health and Social Care NI is currently undergoing a transition from paper-based to electronic record keeping. This is a significant task and the rollout is taking place in phases.
According to the statistical publication of the latest outpatient waiting time figures, this has had an impact on gathering, analysing and comparing data across trust. The report states that:
“On 9 November 2023 the South Eastern Health and Social Care (HSC) Trust launched ‘encompass’ – a new electronic patient record system. The system also went live in Belfast HSC Trust on 6 June 2024 and its rollout across the other Trusts will follow on a phased basis throughout 2024/25. Consequently, as South Eastern HSC Trust continues to transition to completely digitised health records, not all of their data were available at the time of publication. Given the relatively recent transition of Belfast Trust, no data were available for this Trust at the time of publication… As such, any Northern Ireland level figures throughout this report only include data for Northern, Southern and Western HSC Trusts.”
- Wider context
The DUP motion that includes the claim featured in this article itself centres on the apparent need to restructure NI’s entire health and social care system.
Various reports and other official analyses of HSC have come to similar conclusions in the past decade or so. These include 2011’s Transforming Your Care, the Donaldson Report from 2014 and 2016’s Bengoa report.
Each report outlines how various socioeconomic changes, including demographic changes such as NI’s ageing population, are and will continue to lead to growing demand for care – with each concluding that the increase in demand will outstrip the ability to meet that demand.
Keeping that in mind, the same Outpatient Waiting Time Statistics publication from August which features the statistic quoted by both the Private Members’ Motion and the two DUP MLAs also states that:
- 84.2% (194,207) of patients were waiting more than nine weeks for a first consultant-led outpatient appointment on 30 June 2024, compared with 84.0% (196,934) on 31 March 2024 and 82.6% (174,024) on 30 June 2023.
- 50.8% (117,027) of patients were waiting more than 52 weeks for a first consultant-led outpatient appointment on 30 June 2024, compared with 50.2% (117,690) on 31 March 2024 and 47.6% (100,331) on 30 June 2023.
The report also contains several charts showing how certain waiting lists have grown over time.
Figure 1, below, includes a bar chart showing the number of patients who attended first outpatient appointments in each quarter between June 2008 and June 2024 – as well as a line graph indicating how the total waiting list has changed (and largely grown) over the same period:
Figure 1 – source: Northern Ireland Outpatient Waiting Time Statistics at 30 June 2024
Note that the above chart excludes data for the Belfast and SE trusts, as per the explanation in the section above.
However, the same trend of growth in waiting lists can also be seen by adding in data from those trusts for the period up to September 2023 (thus, predating the rollout of the new electronic records system in those excluded trusts):
Figure 2 – source: Northern Ireland Outpatient Waiting Time Statistics at 30 June 2024
For anyone who is interested, the report on outpatient waiting times contains many further pieces of data looking at how demand has changed over time.
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