Waiting Lists are Easy to Manipulate
The VA had reported that 95% of patients seeking an appointment with a mental-health specialist waited the targeted 14 days or fewer. The VA’s Office of Inspector General, though, found the actual percentage was 64%…Last month, a U.K. patient-advocacy group reported wait times for elective surgeries in the U.K. were on the rise. The government said the report was based on only a sample of patients; that its own measures showed waiting times declining; and that fewer patients were experiencing very long waits.
More on the prolonged waiting times for patients in the WSJ.
Seems like waiting lists can be manipulated. Sometimes this helps one, sometimes it doesn’t.
The NHS has raised waiting list fiddles to a high art. The real question should be why the VA has waiting lists.
Anytime a metric can be measured — like the number of people waiting for a treatment — officials embarrassed by the statistic will find ways of fudging the numbers. Some people will be removed from the list for arbitrary reasons and told to sign up again. Others will be removed because they don’t qualify for some mysterious reason. In Canada, there are actually two waiting lists: 1) one for the wait to see a specialist after a referral by a primary care physician; 2) then the wait for the actual treatment once a specialist has been seen. If these two lists were added together and the total waiting time summed, the waiting list would look far more dire.
I have to wonder if waiting list times have ever been determined by which carrier one uses.