Elective care recovery: taking a systems approach (HSSIB, 5 March 2024)

Summary

Elective care refers to when patients receive non-urgent treatment, normally in hospital, including, tests and scans, outpatient care, surgery and cancer treatment.

The NHS is currently seeing long waiting times for some elective procedures, with the Government setting an ambition to reduce elective waiting times to less than a year by 2025.

Increased waiting times mean patients have to wait longer for the care they need. This can lead to patients suffering increased pain, their condition may worsen, or they may develop other illnesses associated with the reason that they are waiting for elective care. This can cause both physical harm and mental distress to patients, their families, and carers.

The Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) Senior Safety Investigator, Neil Alexander, blogs about the challenges facing the NHS in tackling the elective care backlog and how learning from our investigation reports may be able to help the NHS rise to this challenge.