'Significant improvements' made to cancer care in Horsham and Crawley says NHS trust

Surrey and Sussex NHS Trust – which runs East Surrey Hospital and provides services at Horsham Hospital – says between January and June this year, the average waiting time for a patient’s first consultant appointment was 10 days – four days below the national 14-day target.

The information comes after the Labour Party published stats this week following a Freedom of Information request which, it said, showed that cancer patients in the area faced the longest waiting times for care in England.

But the trust says that all health providers experienced challenges with cancer services during the pandemic and recovery period driven by peaks in demand.

But it says there have been significant improvements over the last few months and the trust is now achieving a ‘Faster Diagnosis Standard’ with 75 per cent of patients being informed of their diagnosis, or exclusion of cancer, ahead of a national objective to achieve this by March 2024.

Between January and June 2023, the average waiting time for the first consultant appointment was 10 days, four days below the 14-day target, says the trust.

Between the same period the average time to diagnosis or exclusion of cancer was 26 days, within the 28 day target and the average time to first treatment was 58 days, within the 62 day target.

It says that the information requested by the Labour Party via the FOI was for the longest wait only, with a waiting time of 599 in 2019 – which was before data collection for this new standard had begun.

It says it has since seen an improvement in its longest wait time year on year even during the pandemic with waits dropping to 293 in 2022. The longer wait times, it says, are often related to patient choice or patients who are not medically fit to proceed and are not related to hospital delays or capacity.

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Surrey Heartlands is currently the highest performing Integrated Care Board – responsible for paying for and arranging health care – for Faster Diagnosis Standard performance in June 2023.

For lower gastrointestinal cancer Surrey and Sussex NHS Trust was one of the top three providers in the country in June 2023 with performance of 82.3 per cent.