BMJ 2002;324:241 ( 26 January )

Letters

A "waiting for investigation" index would be useful

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR---Oliver raises the point that all stages of the cancer care pathway need speeding up, not just the time taken to see urgent referrals under the two week rule.1 We are becoming increasingly concerned about the long delays that many patients experience while they wait for investigations needed before the most appropriate treatment can be decided.

The initial delay to see a hospital consultant, and the time spent on a waiting list for treatment, are nationally audited and familiar to patients, but the third wait---for investigations---is rarely acknowledged. We carried out a postal survey of hospital departments in the northwest of England and found disturbingly long waits for commonly requested investigations.

Over a third of the endoscopy and radiology departments that we contacted quoted waits of over two weeks for urgent tests in cases in which malignancy was suspected. Altogether 8% of such patients waited over . . . [Full text of this article]
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Relevant Article

Two week rule for cancer referrals
Simon Thomas, Neil Burnet, M D Oliver, and Paul Sauven
BMJ 2001 323: 864. [Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]

This article has been cited by other articles:

  • Pieters, G., De Gucht, V., Kajosch, H. (2003). Newspaper coverage of psychiatry and general medicine: comparing tabloids with broadsheets. Psychiatr. Bull. 27: 259-260 [Abstract] [Full text]  
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