Chief statistician’s update: explaining NHS activity and performance statistics

Darllenwch y dudalen hon yn Gymraeg

Later this week we’ll publish the latest monthly statistics on NHS activity and performance. Interest in these statistics has increased over the last two years, given the wide-ranging impact of the pandemic. This blog aims to provide more context to its key concepts so that our statistics are widely understood and used appropriately.

Background

The statistical release summarises activity levels of NHS services in the latest available month. It also reports against performance targets set by the Welsh Government.

Digital Health and Care Wales and the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust supply data for this release.

What the data measures

The data captured typically counts the number of times an NHS service is used. It is a common misconception that this is a count of the number of patients who used the service.

In practice this means that we report on the number of:

calls made to the ambulance service, not the number of people who called the ambulance service
attendances at emergency departments, not the number of people who attended emergency departments
referrals for first outpatient appointments, not the number of people referred
patient pathways waiting for diagnostic tests or therapies, not the number of people waiting
patient pathways waiting to start treatment; not the number of people waiting

Why the use of these terms matter

While it may seem that terms like ‘patient pathways’ and ‘patients’ are interchangeable, the key difference is that the same patient might use NHS services many times. A single patient is only counted once in a patient measure but may be counted many times in a patient pathway measure. Similar principles apply to ambulance calls, emergency department attendances and referrals.

This means that the number of patients waiting for NHS services is always lower than the number of patient pathways that are opened. Using measures like patient pathways therefore allows us to measure the full scale of NHS activity in a way that counting “patients” only wouldn’t.

The NHS data that we hold in the Welsh Government doesn’t provide person-level information so we can’t currently measure activity based on patients.

However, the new process for collecting suspected cancer pathway (SCP) data allows for patient-level analyses and gives an idea of the difference between the two measures.

It shows that the number of patient pathways opened in a month is 2% to 3% higher than the number of patients who had pathways opened. Other types of NHS activity, such as referral to treatment and diagnostic testing and therapy services, cover a far wider range of treatment specialties than cancer services. Given this, we expect the difference between patients and patient pathways to be even higher.

As the purpose of this release is to measure the activity and performance of NHS services in a given month, ‘patient pathways’ is the most appropriate measure to use.

How patient pathways work

A patient pathway opens when the hospital receives a referral. The patient’s waiting time starts at this point. Referrals are most commonly submitted by GPs but may also come from other health care professionals. Patients with complex needs may have referrals for multiple types of treatments so may have many pathways opened. The main activity measure for referral to treatment time is a count of the number of patient pathways which are open at the end of each month. This can be thought of as ‘the waiting list’.

Performance against the two referral to treatment performance targets are measured by calculating:

the percentage of pathways where the wait was less than 26 weeks
the number of waits that were longer than 36 weeks in a given month

If a patient has more than one referral they will appear in the dataset more than one time. This means that the same patient can have different pathways counted in the calculations for both targets.

A patient pathway is then closed if either the patient starts treatment, or if following consultation with a hospital specialist, no hospital treatment is necessary. This could include:

patient admitted to hospital for an operation or treatment
starting treatment that does not need a stay in hospital (for example, medication or physiotherapy)
beginning the fitting of a medical device such as leg braces
starting an agreed period of time to monitor the patient’s condition to assess the need for further treatment

Closed pathway data included in the statistical release can be thought of as a measure of ‘referrals completed’. This is where patients have received the service they were referred for.

In other words:

open pathways count the waiting lists for all treatments
closed pathways count the number of pathways taken off the waiting list

If the waiting list is to reduce, the number of closed pathways in a month must exceed the number of new pathways added to the waiting list in the same month.

How does this compare with other UK countries

All four UK countries publish information on a range of NHS performance and activity statistics. These statistics are not exactly comparable between nations. Methods of data collection vary across the UK as they track performance targets that have developed for each country. However, each nation measures the concept of patient pathways rather than patients.

Statisticians in all four home nations have collaborated as part of the ‘UK Comparative Waiting Times Group’. The group looks across published health statistics, in particular waiting times, and compile a comparison of:

what is measured in each country
how the statistics are similar
where they have key differences

This information is available via the Government Statistical Service website and is an area of work we intend to restart shortly.

Further information

Quality reports provide further information on each subject area within the statistical release.