§ Sir Peter Emeryasked the Secretary of State for Social Services by what proportions the hospital lists of persons awaiting operations in orthopaedic departments have been changing over the last three years; and what estimates have been made of the number of people who are not put on to a hospital waiting list by their doctor because of the existing size of the list.
§ Mr. Kenneth Clarke[pursuant to his reply, 30 October 1984]: We categorise the information available centrally on in-patient waiting lists according to the specialty of the consultant but not according to the intended method of treatment. Information for the specialty of orthopaedics is given in the table.
In general we believe that figures on waiting lists include a significant proportion of duplicated entries and patients who no longer require treatment. We cannot readily estimate the amount of overstatement but we believe that it exceeds 10 per cent. nationally and could be considerably more. About half of all admissions to hospital are immediate and many of those on waiting lists already have a planned date of admission.
We can make no estimate centrally of the number of people not referred to the hospital service by their GPs because of the size of the hospital waiting list. We have no evidence to suggest that this is a widespread problem although I accept that long waiting times may influence the referral policy of some general practitioners.
NHS Hospitals in England Year Number of persons on in-patient waiting lists for orthopaedics at 31 March Percentage change over previous year 1981 122,464 — 1982 125,857 +2.8 1983 144,660 *+14.9 1984 138,527 -4.2 * The large increase is attributable to the industrial action in the Health Service.