More information on how health boards manage their waiting lists will be released to the public for the first time in September, following years of pressure from Audit Scotland.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) plans to publish the number of patients waiting for treatment per speciality in each board, including the length of time they have spent waiting to be seen, in its next quarterly Stage of Treatment (SoT) release on the 6^th of September.

In a letter released to healthandcare.scot following an FOI request, the public health body says it will track the monthly trend of how long people in each clinical prioritisation category wait for treatment before being admitted.

Audit Scotland has been pushing for boards to publish data on performance against the clinical prioritisation categories since their adoption, which it says will “enable transparency about how NHS boards are managing their waiting lists”.

Earlier this month, the Scottish government announced plans to eradicate waits of more than one year for inpatient and day case appointments in most specialities by September 2024.

Clinical prioritisation (CP) framework was first adopted by NHS Scotland in November 2020, to give boards clear guidance on how to deal with growing waiting lists during the pandemic and ensure urgent and critical service capacity was maintained.

Updated earlier this year, the guidance now tells health boards to attempt to concurrently treat patients that require urgent clinical care as well as those waiting for long periods.

Local and national systems have been developed to capture the recording of new CP categories for all inpatients and day cases, covered by the Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG).

The letter says not all boards managed to supply CP codes for 90%+ of patients waiting by the end of September last year, but the majority were able to do so.

PHS is also looking to expand the SoT to better explore health inequalities, by publishing statistics on deprivation and ethnic group.

Geography-based analysis could also be developed, says the organisation, to highlight how patents are moving across Scotland in search of treatment.

CP was introduced as an “interim” measure until services fully recovered from the pandemic, but Public Health Scotland says it assumes the framework will continue to be applied for the foreseeable.

NHS Grampian does not use the clinical prioritisation, instead sticking with the Elective Surgery Categorisation System (ESCatS) it introduced in 2017.

Similar to the clinical prioritisation framework, ESCatS allows clinicians to prioritise patients based on their clinical presentation and manage the risk of waiting.

As of the end of March this year, there were 14 people in NHS Dumfries and Galloway who had been waiting for more than 104 weeks for treatment – at least one of which was coded P3 and should have been scheduled within 12 weeks according to the framework.

In NHS Ayrshire & Arran, people waiting for inpatient or day case across all prioritisation levels has almost doubled since November 2020, from 5,674 to 10,551 in April this year.

NHS Highland only started tracking the data in a robust and trackable method in September 2021.In response to our FOI request, the board said the volume and complexity of communication between the board and PHS about publishing its data was too “vast” to collate, surpassing the maximum cost ceiling of the regulations.

Read more: New framework to deal with treatment backlog; Pledge to eliminate two-week waits by September; NHS board tells GPs to cease non urgent work

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