Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress they are making in ensuring that the NHS collects data on whether return out-patient appointments are being delayed beyond the clinically recommended time due to insufficient capacity or targets for new patients that are prioritised over returns.

There are no plans to collect additional data on out-patient appointments.

Many patients will require further planned stages of treatment after their waiting time clock has stopped. This treatment should be undertaken without undue delay and in line with when it is clinically appropriate and convenient to the patient to do so.

Patients requiring initial or follow-up appointments for clinical assessment, review, monitoring, procedures or treatment must be given a clear expectation of the timeframe for this, as required by best clinical evidence. If the planned procedure is then delayed beyond that timeframe, a new waiting time clock should start and be reported in the waiting time statistics, to ensure that these patients are kept in sight.