Taking a user-centred approach to waiting times

Scott Heald, Director of Data and Digital Innovation and Head of Profession for Statistics at Public Health Scotland, discusses the importance of keeping people at the centre of data improvement.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) is Scotland’s lead national body for improving and protecting the health and wellbeing of everyone in Scotland. We want people to live longer, and we want the gap between life expectancy for the wealthiest and poorest people to decrease. Access to timely health and social care when people need it is an essential part of realising these ambitions.

One of our key roles is producing official statistics and detailed analysis of waiting times for health and care services, along with our partners NHS24 and the Scottish Ambulance Service. These statistics are among our most heavily used, for example by health charities, NHS and local government staff, policy makers, and you’ll often see them featured in the press.

However, there is an even more important group who need this information: the people actually waiting for appointments and treatment, and their families and friends. User feedback on waiting times figures produced by PHS, which were previously available on NHS Inform, showed that the data didn’t fully reflect people’s experiences of waiting times.

We asked patients and other users to help us develop a new website to specifically meet this need.  Launched in December, the new site contains waiting times data for planned first appointments with consultants and inpatient treatment services (not emergency treatment). The figures are available for all health boards.

People who have been referred for an appointment or treatment can now look at this website and see the maximum number of weeks waited by 5 in 10 people with appointments for that service (also known as the median wait), and also by 9 in 10 people (i.e. the longest time the majority of people wait for), which is more reflective of patient experiences overall. Health boards across Scotland may choose to direct their patients to this site, reducing the need for this information to be published in lots of different places.

We know there are other measures that would also be valuable to users and we will continue to develop the site where we can. For example, showing how long people wait for urgent referrals for appointments or treatment could be considered if guidance comes into place that ensures this data is consistently recorded across Scotland.

The new website is part of wider work at PHS to improve the presentation of our statistics to better meet people's needs, make our processes more efficient and provide better value for public money. This summer we ran a survey asking users for their views about our current statistics publications. It’s clear that users value a lot of what we do, but we also received useful feedback about different ways we could present information and new topics that would be welcome. Making improvements like these within the resources we have available will mean some existing publications might need to be published less often, include less detailed content, or stop altogether.

Many public bodies are reviewing their statistics to identify better ways to meet user needs within available resources. The Office for Statistics Regulation, who set the standards for all official statistics in the UK, understand that changes need to happen, and expect users to be at the heart of the process. So, we will keep asking for feedback about any proposed changes and we will explain our reasons for any decisions we take.

Visit the new website

We also release a wide range of research and statistical publications