On 11th March 2019, NHS England published a clinically-led review of NHS Access Standards https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/clinical-review-nhs-access-standards/. This report proposes new a suite of that are believed to offer an opportunity to better serve patients.

This proposed change sees an expansion to targets for Mental Health and Community services and reshaping of the Acute A&E, Cancer and Elective care access standards. The proposed standards are now being tested at a selection of sites across England, before wider evaluation and formal implementation. Before any final changes are implemented to the standards, which are set out in legislation a public consultation will be conducted.

For the acute sector the proposed indicators for A&E, Cancer and Elective care are as follows;

• A&E – Time to initial clinical assessment
• A&E – Time to emergency treatment
• A&E – Average total time in A&E
• A&E – Utilisation of same day emergency care
• Cancer – Faster diagnosis standard
  • Maximum 28-day wait to communication of definitive cancer/not cancer
• Cancer – Maximum 62 day wait to first treatment from all referral sources
• Cancer – Maximum 31-day wait from decision to treat to treatment
• Elective care:
  • Either defined number of maximum weeks wait for incomplete (same as current), but with a review of the percentage threshold to be within 18 weeks (currently 92%); or
  • Average wait target for incomplete pathways
  • Elective care – 26-week patient choice offer
  • Elective care – 52-week treatment guarantee

Over the past two weeks the team at Public View have been working to bring all users the first view of how they are performing against the proposed standards. There is still more work to do to get the complete suite, but just two weeks after new standards being proposed Public View has scoured the public data sets to bring together the first benchmarking of 7 of the 10 new proposed standards.

To view your hospital’s performance against the new indicators, plus many others, click here to log in or contact us to see what Public View can do.