Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust responding to challenge to ‘significantly improve’ elective surgery waiting list

The chief executive of the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT) has confirmed progress on reducing waiting lists for patients.

Thom Lafferty attended the NHS Confederation conference earlier this month, where Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, talked about Labour’s reform plans and Sir Jim Mackey, chief executive of NHS England, updated on efforts to cut red tape.

Mr Lafferty told the Indie: “There’s a big push to give providers more freedom to be able to operate – so less bureaucracy for the NHS, less regulation, less monitoring, less prescriptive diktats on what we should be doing and what we should not be doing.

“However, that freedom comes with a series of conditions, and they all tie to us being able to show that we can deliver the best patient outcomes.

“Those patient outcomes are quantified and assessed through things like the number of patients on waiting lists.”

Mr Lafferty said that specifically, PAHT had been challenged to “significantly improve” its elective surgery waiting list.

He said substantial progress was already being made: “We now have no 65-week wait. That was something that we did have a number of only a few weeks ago and we’ve managed to clear that.”

In January, the Government set out its aspirations for tackling the 7.5 million-strong waiting list Labour inherited from the Conservatives.

The NHS Constitution sets out that patients should wait no longer than 18 weeks from GP referral to treatment.

The Elective Reform Plan, published by NHS England earlier this year, outlines a comprehensive, system-wide strategy to achieve the 18-week referral-to-treatment (RTT) target by the conclusion of the current Parliament.

Mr Lafferty acknowledged that PAHT had initially been operating from a relatively low baseline against this measure.

“That is something we must recognise,” he said. “We have demonstrated consecutive improvement over the past five months and we are successfully progressing along our agreed trajectory for improvement, as endorsed by NHS England.”

He further emphasised that while there remains considerable work to undertake, he was encouraged by the trust’s ongoing progress, noting that it is “advancing in a positive direction”.