FOI240230: Referral waiting time for Paediatric ENT and Cardiology services

Released 1 July 2024

Please provide:

1. The name of the Executive Team support for the CEO George Findlay. 
2. The Executive support work contact details, specifically the work contact email and work contact number and direct extension.
3. The Executive support contact working hours i.e. 9-5 or 10-4 daily. etc 
4. The name and work contact email and phone number for the Head of Administrative services at the hospital trust.
   In addition please confirm current target waiting times for:

1. An ENT referral for a child at Worthing and Portsmouth Hospital,
2. An actual Pediatric Cardiologist referral at Worthing Hospital.
3. Can you advise current target achievement in respect of the above two referral types.
4. Can you advise target achieving respect of the above two referral types over the last 18 months.
5. Can you advise how you measure that target achievement.

Information disclosed:

Part 1.

Please note that we have split your request into two parts, in order to make our responses clearer.

1-4. The Trust’s Executive Team can be contacted by email. Your correspondence will then be directed to the most appropriate member of the Executive Team for review and action where appropriate.

If you are a patient, relative or carer and have a query or concern about the Trust’s services, please contact the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) which provides confidential support, advice and information about our services. Information about this service and how to access it can be found on our website.

Part 2.

1. The paediatric and adult ENT service at St Richard’s Hospital is provided by Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust. As the service provider, they will hold all the requested information about target waiting times for this service, and any specific performance targets. To obtain this information, you will need to make a Freedom of Information request to them, or they can be emailed.

Alternatively, you can write to them at:

Governance Department,

Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust,

De La Court House Room 0.02,

Queen Alexandra Hospital,

Southwick Hill Road,

Cosham,

Portsmouth,

Hampshire, PO6 3LY

2. The ENT service for under 18 year-olds at Worthing Hospital is currently focused on achieving NHS England’s Operational Guidance 2024/25. This guidance focuses on ensuring that patients do not wait more than 78 weeks for treatment by the end of June 2024; and patients do not wait more than 65 weeks for treatment by the end of September 2024. The Trust’s paediatric cardiology service is also currently working to meet these targets.  

3. Please see the table below for information relevant to this question. We have provided the median waiting time over the last four weeks for both urgent and routine appointments:

4. Please see the tables below for the number of patients who had completed a Referral to Treatment  [RTT] wait for both routine and urgent referrals within 78 weeks since December 2022 for paediatric cardiology and ENT appointments for patients under the age of 18.

For paediatric ENT appointments at Worthing Hospital:

Please note that within the table above where “≤5” is indicated, this data has been anonymised in line with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) Anonymisation: Managing Data Protection Risk Code of Practice as it relates to the disclosure of information relevant to a small number of living people. We consider the disclosure of more specific information to be exempt under section 40(2) [personal information] exemption.

We have, however, added totals to our table to ensure our data was meaningful.

For paediatric cardiology appointments at Worthing Hospital:

5. The Trust has an operational performance assurance framework, which uses reports from the Trust’s Business Intelligence reporting system. This extracts data from Careflow, the Trust’s Patient Administration System. These reports are then used with the metrics listed in part 2, question 1 above, to measure performance.

Additionally, Divisional Directors update our more senior Directors and the Executive team every week about progress with reducing the number of patients waiting over 78 weeks for treatment to zero; updates also include monthly Strategy Deployment Reviews for this purpose. Over and above this internal assurance, the Trust’s Chief Operating Officer (CEO) and/or Deputy CEO regularly updates the local Integrated Care Board [NHS Sussex] and NHS England regarding progress with reducing the number of patients who have been waiting over 78 weeks for treatment to zero.