Hundreds of Tayside patients have been kept waiting longer for treatment than the guaranteed maximum, due to the impact of exceptionally bad weather.
However, health bosses were told that by the end of this month the health service will have caught up on the backlog and no patients will be in breach of the target times.
When bad weather hit at the end of last year NHS Tayside switched to an emergency service and cancelled non-urgent appointments and operations for five days. Around 8000 operations and clinic appointments were cancelled, leaving the health authority playing catch-up.
The doctor responsible for waiting times performance in Tayside has predicted there would be no breaches by the end of the month. Associate medical director Dr Alan Cook gave an update on the position at Wednesday’s meeting of NHS Tayside’s Delivery Unit in King’s Cross Hospital, Dundee.
The target for in-patient and day-case waiting times is that they will receive treatment within nine weeks of a decision to treat being taken. At the end of January 3633 Tayside patients were covered by that target and 96 of those patients waited longer.
A further 16,051 new out-patients across Tayside were covered by a target that they should be seen within 12 weeks of being referred to hospitals or clinics. By the end of January 370 of them had waited longer.
Since last March there were few waiting time breaches, although the graphs do show a spike during December.
“We see the impact of the bad weather that hit us over the last two days in November and the first three days of December,” said Dr Cook. “You can see from the January figures we are starting a recovery and the February position shows continued recovery.”