It has emerged that A&E figures at Arrowe Park Hospital in Merseyside between March 2008 and April 2009 cannot be relied upon because they were fiddled by A&E managers who were under pressure to meet government targets. There's a similar case being investigated at Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham where the waiting times figures for treating A&E patients within the stipulated four hours were also allegedly fiddled.
I came across one way which is used to distort the figures in NHS A&E recently. Patients wait for up to four hours in the waiting room and just as they are about to go over into the fifth hour, they are moved from the waiting room to the treatment area where they wait for another couple of hours. The target is met i.e. out of the waiting room in less than four hours and the government inspector is satisfied.
Who is not satisfied? The patient of course, the customer, who is using a different system of measurement, the only one that matters, the one that says "waited for six hours".
We've also heard of ambulances waiting on the car park until Accident and Emergency is in a position to start the clock and process the patient within the four hour target, but that's old news, they've obviously moved on to some new fiddle by now. Haven't they?
If only the government could channel all the creative thinking that goes into finding new ways to cheat to meet their targets into creating genuine improvements we'd all be much happier - and where did they come up with the notion that a four hour wait is a good thing to aim for anyway? Not by listening to the 'Voice of the Customer" that's for certain.
Link: Daily Express
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