Claim: ‘Patients’ and ‘pathways’ are the same thing when addressing NHS waiting lists
Each month, the Welsh Government publishes the latest statistics on NHS activity and performance, with data provided by Digital Health and Care Wales and the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust.
The data 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.
A patient pathway opens when the hospital receives a referral from GPs or other healthcare professionals. The patient’s waiting time starts at this point. Patients with complex needs may have referrals for multiple types of treatments so may have more than one pathway opened.
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.
This means that the number of patients waiting for NHS services is always lower than the number of patient pathways that are open. 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.
More information can be found at: Chief statistician’s update: explaining NHS activity and performance statistics | Digital and Data Blog (gov.wales)
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