Private Treatment - FOI Response Register

I would just like to clarify why I sent such a similar FOI.

I wanted to see if the figures in the year 2022/23 had increased since I last asked, therefore can I please ask for the following:

1. The total number of patients who have left an NHS waiting list in 2022/23 due to opting for a private healthcare treatment or operation instead.

2. If possible, for those people who left a waiting list in 2022/23,  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 data covering the period 01/04/2022 – 31/10/2022.
• With regards to Q1, we provided data covering 7 of the 11 months requested here therefore the first part of the request is substantially similar to FOI 2022-425.
• With regards to Q2, 11 months of data has been requested, with 7 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.

However please note that we would be happy to comply with a request that is not repeated and requests data we have not previously supplied ie from 01/11/2022 onwards.