Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what the average waiting times were for (a) heart and (b) cancer operations in (i) Barnsley East constituency, (ii) Barnsley local authority area, (iii) South Yorkshire and (iv) England.

The information requested is shown in the following table. These data are from hospital episode statistics and measure the time waiting between decision to admit and admission to hospital. They are not the same as referral to treatment waiting times, which measure waiting times from referral to the start of consultant-led treatment by 18 treatment functions (subdivisions of consultant main specialties), but which do not include condition specific information.

Average time waited in 2012-13 for finished admission episodes with (a) a main operative procedure, heart and (b) a primary diagnosis of cancer

Source: Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), Health and Social Care Information Centre

Notes:

1. Activity in English NHS hospitals and English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector.

2. Time waited (days) is the time waited for all patients between decision to admit and admission to hospital.

3. Time waited (days) statistics from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) are not the same as published Referral to Treatment (RTT) time waited statistics. HES provides counts and time waited for all patients between decision to admit and admission to hospital within a given period. Published RTT waiting statistics measure the time waited between referral and start of treatment.

4. A finished admission episode (FAE) is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider. FAEs are counted against the year or month in which the admission episode finishes. Admissions do not represent the number of patients, as a person may have more than one admission within the period.

5. The main procedure is the first recorded procedure or intervention in each episode, usually the most resource intensive procedure or intervention performed during the episode. It is appropriate to use main procedure when looking at admission details, (eg time waited), but a more complete count of episodes with a particular procedure is obtained by looking at the main and the secondary procedures.

6. The primary diagnosis is the first of up to 20 (14 from 2002-03 to 2006-07 and 7 prior to 2002-03) diagnosis fields in the HES data set and provides the main reason why the patient was admitted to hospital. In this case the main procedure codes used were K01 - K78, Heart

7. The following ICD-10 codes were used: C00 - C97, Cancer

8. Parliamentary constituency of residence, local authority of residence and area team of residence, are the geographical areas containing the patient’s normal home address. They do not necessarily reflect where the patient was treated as they may have travelled to another parliamentary constituency for treatment.

9. The total number of eligible admissions from which the mean and median time waited are derived includes waiting list and booked admissions, but not planned admissions. A waiting list admission is one in which a patient has been admitted electively into hospital from a waiting list, having been given no date of admission at the time a decision to admit was made. Booked admissions are those in which the patient was admitted electively having been given a date at the time it was decided to admit. Planned admissions are excluded as they are usually part of a planned sequence of clinical care determined mainly on clinical criteria, which, for example, could require a series of events, perhaps taking place every three months, six months or annually. It is the case that some providers do not supply the data required to calculate a time waited on eligible episodes.