Current status: Answered by Neil Gray on 17 October 2025
To ask the Scottish Government what its position is on whether the Treatment Time Guarantee can be meaningfully enforced in cases where NHS boards are unable to measure full patient pathways, and what assessment it has made of compliance under such circumstances.
I refer the member to the answers for questions S6W-40963 and S6W-40964 on 17 October 2025.
The Patient Rights (Scotland) Act 2011 legislates that an eligible patient is to start to receive agreed inpatient or day case treatment within a 12-week Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG). This guarantee is based on completed waits where a patient is removed from the list after being admitted for treatment and does not include periods of waiting pre-decision to treat. Health Boards must take all reasonable steps to ensure they comply with this standard.
To support the above guarantee, 95% of new outpatients should wait no longer than 12 weeks from referral to being seen at a consultant-led clinic. This includes all referral sources.
We have seen progress in inpatient and day-case admissions, with 57% taking place within 12 weeks, up from the previous quarter, while a third of those still waiting had done so for less than 12 weeks. We expect NHS Boards to focus on these individual targets for each part of the patient journey, and we have routinely performance managed Boards on this basis since the implementation of the Patient Rights (Scotland) Act 2011.
In addition, the Scottish Government’s NHS Scotland Waiting Times Guidance was updated in November 2023 to provide guidance for Health Boards to assist them in the delivery of the national waiting times standards. This guidance replaces the previous 2012 publication and continues to ensure that patients who are waiting for an appointment, diagnostic test or treatment are managed fairly and consistently across NHS Scotland. The changes made align to our commitment to deliver sustained improvements and reductions to waiting times through service redesign, as well as enhanced regional and national working across NHS Scotland.
Finally, our Budget is providing more than £110 million to Health Boards this year to support reductions to the longest waits for appointments and procedures.
All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found at https://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.