Waiting Lists (Hansard, 22 January 2002)

§ 26. Tom Brake
To ask the Secretary of State for Health if he will make a statement on his plans to reduce waiting times and waiting lists in the NHS. [26386]

§ Mr. Hutton
The NHS Plan sets out the progress this Government want to make over the coming years. The plan, which was announced in July 2000, addresses waiting times for outpatient and inpatient treatment.
By the end of 2005 the maximum in-patient waiting time will be cut from 18 months now to six months and the maximum out-patient waiting time will be cut from over six months now to three months. Urgent cases will continue to be treated much faster.
Our objective is to reduce the maximum wait for any stage of treatment to three months by the end of 2008. As a result of delivering these policies we expect the average time for an out-patient appointment to fall to five weeks and the average time that patients have been waiting for in-patient treatment to fall from three months to seven weeks.
This Government met their 1997 manifesto commitment to reduce the total number of patients on the in-patient waiting list by 100,000. We achieved this in March 2000 and have maintained it ever since. The NHS is expected to continue to reduce the waiting list in order to make achievement of the maximum waiting times more manageable.
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§ Dr. Fox
To ask the Secretary of State for Health how many trust managers have been dismissed on grounds of gross misconduct after manipulating waiting list figures. [27255]

§ Mr. Hutton
The National Audit Office report "Inappropriate adjustments to national health service waiting lists" listed nine trusts where inappropriate adjustments had taken place. In two of these trusts, Salford and Stoke Mandeville, the investigations have reached the disciplinary stage. There have been no trust managers dismissed on grounds of gross misconduct in the other seven cases.
The Department accepts that some of the earlier cases covered in the report were not always handled properly and it accepts in full the recommendations set out the NAO report. In future, any manager found to have deliberately distorted waiting figures will face dismissal on grounds of gross misconduct. This will be supported by a new code of conduct for national health service managers. Anyone who breaches that code of conduct will not be re-employed as a manager—anywhere in the national health service.