Question reference: S6W-25480
- Asked by: Pam Gosal, MSP for West Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 12 February 2024
-
Current status: Answered by Neil Gray on 26 February 2024
Question
To ask the Scottish Government what specific actions it is taking to reduce waiting times for ear, nose and throat treatment.
Answer
The Scottish Government commissioned Centre for Sustainable Delivery (CfSD) is playing a central role in working with Health Boards to ensure that they are able to continually identify new ways to increase capacity, and to respond to demand through service innovation and redesign.
CfSD programmes have developed strong clinically-led Specialty Delivery Groups (SDG), including one for Ear, Nose & Throat (ENT), which promote multidisciplinary team working, and support local adoption of service improvement programmes. These groups are now well established and have supported several new and innovative pathway developments to free-up additional capacity in the NHS system, many of which are now being successfully scaled up across Scotland. For ENT this includes Active Clinical Referral Triage (ACRT), Discharge Patient Initiated Review (PIR) and Opt-In Pathways.
We know there is more to do but we are making progress; since the introduction of our long wait targets in July 2022, ENT waits over two years have reduced by 93% for new outpatient appointments and by 54% for inpatient and day-case patients.