Hospitals are cancelling record numbers of outpatient appointments, which doctors say illustrates the unprecedented strain on the NHS.
Hospitals in England cancelled 7.68m outpatient appointments last year, almost three times more than the 2.76m they called off a decade earlier.
Cancellations have also increased over that time as a proportion of all outpatient appointments, from 4.6% in 2005-06, to 6.8% in 2015-16 – which is a 48% jump.
The latest annual figures for hospital outpatient activity published by NHS Digital confirms that demand for healthcare has been rising sharply. While there were 60.6m appointments in 2005-06, that had almost doubled to 113.3m last year.
“The rising rate of outpatient appointments is another sign of an NHS under stress,” said Andrew Goddard, the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) registrar. “While most appointments are postponed rather than just cancelled, the extra waiting time can cause anxiety for patients and delay in getting the right treatment.”
Evidence collected by the RCP indicated that the NHS was struggling to cope with the increasing pressures of rising demand and inadequate funding and therefore it needed a new budget, Goddard said.
The proportion of patients classed as “did not attend,” because they did not turn up for an appointment, has fallen, from 8.3% (5 million ) to 6.6% (7.5 million). But more patients have been cancelling appointments – 6.4% (7.2 million) than did so last year, and this was up from 4% (2.4million) in 2005-06.
Overall, patients attended 89.44m of the 113.3m appointments last year, an attendance rate of almost four in five (78.9%), slightly down from the 82.6% seen a decade ago. But the proportion cancelled by the patient or hospital rose, from 8.6% to 13.2%.
Women are much more likely than men to attend outpatient appointments. Last year 51.7 million women attended compared to 37.6 million men. There were 186 outpatient visits among women per 100 population but just 139 for men.
Five areas of specialist medical care accounted for 30% of all last year’s outpatient appointments: trauma and orthopaedics (7.65m), opthamology (7.3m), physiotherapy (5m), obstetrics (3.65m) and dermatology (3.46m).
The shadow health minister, Justin Madders, said: “These shocking figures are yet another example of patients being let down by a health service unable to cope with demand due to six years of Tory underfunding. Despite the best efforts of hard-working NHS staff, the system is now stretched to breaking point. Last week Theresa May missed the opportunity to deliver the rescue package that the NHS so badly needs. Ministers need to stop burying their heads in the sand and face up to the level of the crisis that they have created.”
Responding to the figures, a Department of Health spokesperson said: “The number of cancelled outpatient appointments remains very low given that the NHS is seeing millions more people every year. In fact, in 2015/16 the NHS treated 9.6 million more people as outpatients compared to 2009/10.”
• This article was amended on 2 December 2016 to add a comment from the Department of Health that was received after publication.
