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Thursday 2 December 2010

Delivery

In today's Belfast Telegraph Tom Elliott declared that:

"I want to show people that we are a party of delivery.  You only have to look at our ministries, particularly health..."

Also today the BBC highlighted new data showing that those seeking outpatient appointments are facing increased waits.  The official figures show that:

"The total number of people waiting for a first outpatient appointment at the end of September 2010 was 128,835.
This represented an increase of 18,615 (+16.9%) on the number waiting at the end of June 2010 (110,220) and an increase of 55,128 (+74.8%) on the number waiting at the same time last year (73,707)."

It's not simply more waiting but they are waiting longer:

"At the end of September 2010, there were 52,326 (40.6%) patients waiting more than nine weeks for a first outpatient appointment, of which 35,969 were waiting more than 13 weeks. The number of patients waiting longer than nine weeks represented an increase of 23,177 on the figure for the previous quarter (29,149), and was up 47,767 on the corresponding quarter in 2009 (4,559).

The proportion of people waiting more than nine weeks for a first outpatient appointment has increased from 6.2% in September 2009 to 26.4% in June 2010, and increased further to 40.6% in September 2010."

As the BBC pointed out that is a 1048% increase in those waiting more than 9 weeks in the last year.

6 comments:

Owen Polley said...

If the DUP takes credit for abolishing prescription charges (which was by the way a bad idea), aren't they also responsible for problems in the NHS? Or doesn't it work that way round?

thedissenter said...

Confused by this. Surely if last weekend Peter Robinson was taking credit for free prescriptions then by same token he must also take responsibilty for lengthening waiting lists in the general spirit of collective Executive reponsibility? After all, same Department at same Executive at which he chairs as First Minister.

Lee said...

The point of the post has missed you both. It's about media management not credit or blame.

Lee said...

If it is going to be a part of your party message to big up one aspect e.g. health as part of your pre-conference build-up then someone should have checked that there wasn't anything going to contradict/undermine that. At bare minimum made sure it didn't happen on the same day.

Michael Shilliday said...

Errr, so shouldn't someone have told Peter before he made a big deal of it by the same logic? Maybe someone working for the party perhaps.....

Lee said...

Err Peter didn't make a big deal of how the department of health was run.