NHS Highland has missed 15 of 23 key performance indicators including crucial targets for the 62-day cancer treatment start time, A&E 12-hour waits and delayed discharges.
The Integrated Performance and Quality Report delivered at this week’s board meeting revealed 65 per cent of targets were being missed by margins of between less than five per cent to over 10 per cent.
The state of the NHS was perhaps the biggest issue of the Holyrood elections which returned a minority SNP government.
The new report highlighted performance in areas related to the Scottish Government’s Operational Improvement Plan (OIP) – the SNP’s proposed solution to the healthcare crisis.
The OIP’s objective is to renew the NHS by shifting “the balance of care from acute services to the community, and use digital and technological innovation to improve access to care.”
The performance indicators are divided into four categories: red – over 10 per cent off target; yellow – more than five per cent off target; green – under five per cent off target; and blue – meeting the target.
Missed targets
The 31-day target for cancer treatment stood at 89.7 per cent while the 62-day target for treatment was 67.3 per cent and so missed the 95 per cent national standard and were in the yellow and red zones respectively.
That was put down to delays on MRI testing and reports due to a lack of staff and machine capacity for prostate cancer while colorectal cancer saw a four-week wait for an endoscopy and waiting times to get a scan and breast cancer was impacted by the waiting time for assessment and diagnostic service.
Delayed discharges, both for all cases and what the health board calls “standard” cases, were in the red zone after a March census found there were a total of 232 delays. That was described as “higher than the improvement trajectory due to sustained pressures in social care”.
The Neurodevelopmental Assessment Service waiting list grew to 2197 patients with just 138 patients getting a first appointment within the 18-week target time.
For the rest 343 would wait up to a year; 547 for one and two years; 579 for more than two to three years; 365 for three to four years; 169 for four to five years; and 56 could expect to wait for more than five years for a first appointment.
This was put down to “extremely limited clinical capacity to complete assessments”.
The smoking cessation service recorded 62 quits in quarter two of 2025/26, falling short of the local target of 84 per quarter, while data collection issues in community pharmacies and “high smoking rates in young pregnant women” were described as “primary challenges”.
A&E waits were all in the red zone: the latest four-hour waits were 79.4 per cent against a national 95 per cent target and in November-March the eight-hour wait rose by 36 per cent and the 12-hour wait by 34 per cent.
The exact percentage was not given but all were trending in the wrong direction according to the report. Despite that, the board claimed statistics relating to the four-hour wait were the second best in Scotland.
A spokesman for the health board said: “NHS Highland works extremely hard in improving performance across all our portfolios of service provision.
“We also seek to benchmark our performance and trajectories against other boards in Scotland and with some indicators we have a favourable position however in other areas we recognise that there is still work needing to be done to improve our performance.”
Other targets that are being missed or met
• CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) 18-week referral-to-treatment – 84.6 per cent against a 90 per cent target
• Drug and alcohol waiting times three-week referral-to-treatment – 84.2 per cent against a 90 per cent target
• Psychological therapies 18-week referral-to-treatment – 83.3 per cent against a 90 per cent target
• Radiology six-week waiting time – 72.6 per cent against 80 per cent short-term, 90 per cent long-term targets.
There are eight areas where NHS Highland is at least meeting its targets:
• Alcohol brief interventions (number per quarter)
• New outpatients – number of patients waiting more than 52 weeks
• Treatment time guarantee – cumulative performance against activity plan
• Treatment time guarantee – number of patients waiting after more than 52 weeks
• Radiology – cumulative performance against activity plan
• Endoscopy – cumulative performance against activity plan
• Endoscopy – less than six-week waiting time
• Systemic anti-cancer therapy access and benchmarking (as first treatment) – average waiting time
Do you want to respond to this article? If so, click here to submit your thoughts and they may be published in print.
Original source: gb