Surgery
(asked on 11th November 2016) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many elective operations were cancelled in each of the last five years.
The number of cancelled operations remains low in the context of the millions of operations performed in the National Health Service each year. Cancelled elective operations in Quarter 1 2016/17 as a percentage of elective admissions were 0.9%. However, hospitals should continue to do everything they can to keep last minute cancellations of operations to an absolute minimum.
NHS England publishes information each quarter on the number of last minute elective operations cancelled for non-clinical reasons. The following table shows this information for the last five years plus the first two quarters of 2016/17. A last minute cancellation is defined as when a patient’s operation is cancelled by the hospital on or after the day of admission, including the day of surgery, for non-clinical reasons.
Number of elective operations cancelled for non-clinical reasons in each of the last five years, 2011/12 to 2015/16 and Quarters 1 and 2 2016/17
Year | Quarter | Number of cancelled elective operations |
2011/12 | 1 | 12,780 |
| 2 | 12,892 |
| 3 | 14,696 |
| 4 | 16,719 |
2012/13 | 1 | 14,113 |
| 2 | 13,155 |
| 3 | 16,281 |
| 4 | 19,968 |
2013/14 | 1 | 15,443 |
| 2 | 15,032 |
| 3 | 15,852 |
| 4 | 17,868 |
2014/15 | 1 | 15,650 |
| 2 | 15,898 |
| 3 | 19,470 |
| 4 | 20,464 |
2015/16 | 1 | 16,099 |
| 2 | 16,414 |
| 3 | 18,393 |
| 4 | 23,352 |
2016/17 | 1 | 18,730 |
| 2 | 19,399 |