Hospitals given green light to miss waiting time targets

More than 50 hospitals in England have been given the green light to miss key waiting time targets this year to help ease their financial problems.

The move is part of a package of measures taken by NHS bosses after hospitals exceeded their budgets by a record amount last year.

Fines for missing targets in A&E, cancer and routine operations have been scrapped altogether. And a new failure regime is being set up for the worst-performing trusts.


It will see regulators parachute senior managers into the hospitals to help devise plans to get them out of trouble.

Five trusts - Barts Health in London, Croydon Health Services, Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, Norfolk and Norwich Hospitals and North Bristol - have been placed into the new regime immediately, with another 13 threatened with the prospect.

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But the relaxation of rules over waiting times is the most radical element of the announcement made by bosses at the three national bodies that oversee the health service - NHS England and the regulators NHS Improvement and the Care Quality Commission.

Hospitals have been struggling to hit their targets for some time and will now no longer be fined for missing the four-hour A&E target, the 62-day target to get cancer treatment and the 18-week goal for routine operations, such as hip and knee replacements.

Instead, they will have to simply improve on their current performance to get their slice of the extra money being invested in the NHS this year.

Each hospital has been given its own target for improvement and, crucially for some and particularly in regards to A&E, it allows them to get the funding without achieving the official targets by March.

This is the case for 53 out of the 139 trusts running A&E units, five cancer hospitals and three sites doing routine operations.

Targets and fines: How they work

A&E: 95% of patients are meant to be dealt with in four hours. When this is exceeded a fine of £120 per patient is levied. The fines are capped so that when performance drops below 85% no more penalties are imposed.

Routine operations: 92% of patients are meant to start treatment within 18 weeks. When the numbers waiting longer than this exceed that threshold hospitals are fined £400 per patient. Once it drops to 90% the level of the fines are capped.

Cancer: Hospitals are meant to start treatment on patients who receive an urgent referral by a GP within 62 days for 85% of patients. Fines of £1,000 per patient are levied when patients wait longer. There is no cap.