Private Treatment - FOI Response Register

I am looking for information regarding patients who have left an NHS waiting list before receiving treatment or operation.

Please provide the following information:

1. The total number of patients who have left an NHS waiting list in the last 6 financial years (2017/ 18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23) due to opting for a private healthcare treatment or operation instead.

Please also provide that data in a separate table that reflects it in calendar years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022)

Please ensure the data is as up to date as possible.

2. For those people who left a waiting list in the last five years, please provide the duration of time they had waited for treatment or operation before they left the list.

Under FOISA s 14(2), NHS Shetland is not obliged to comply with a repeated request from the same requester, if it has recently complied with the original request.

Having reviewed your request, NHS Shetland has determined that the request is identical or substantially similar to your previous request of 12/10/2023 (FOI 2022-425) and so is unable to provide the information requested; we have provided further justification for this decision below:

• In response to Q3 & Q4 of FOI 2022-425 (Q1 & Q2 respectively here) we provided 5 years’ worth of data covering the period 01/11/2017 – 31/10/2022.
• With regards to Q1, we provided data covering 5 of the 6 years requested here therefore the first part of the request is substantially similar to FOI 2022-425.
• With regards to Q2, 60 months of data has been requested, with 56 months of this request being for data we have previously provided and only 4 months of the request covering new data, therefore the second part of the request is substantially similar to FOI 2022-425.