Some of the differences between Scottish and English waiting times are pretty obvious. England has three 18-week referral-to-treatment targets and a 6-week diagnostic wait (pp.38 & 58), whereas Scotland has one 18-week referral-to-treatment target, a 6-week diagnostic wait, a 12 week inpatient/daycase Treatment Time Guarantee, and a non-legally-binding 12 week outpatient wait (p.5). Already we can see that it’s quite complicated in England, but even more complicated in Scotland.

If you dig into these targets you find the rules are different too. The differences are pretty big, and many patients who would have a right to short waiting times in England, enjoy no such guarantees in Scotland.

For instance, if you are referred to an English hospital then they have to accept the referral and treat you (unless they don’t provide that kind of care, or you agree to be treated elsewhere) (pp.7-8). But in Scotland the hospital can routinely send its patients just about anywhere it likes (p.16), even if the destination is way outside the boundaries of its Health Board; any patient who refuses can be taken off the waiting list or have their ‘clock’ reset to zero (p.17). In case you think that such long-distance transfers might be a rare event, Scottish Health Boards have regular arrangements to send increasingly large numbers of waiting list patients to the Golden Jubilee National Hospital west of Glasgow, even from as far away as Orkney (p.5).

You have to be ready at short notice in Scotland too, because the NHS considers seven days’ notice to be a “reasonable offer” (p.15), compared with three weeks in England (pp.34-35). (To protect urgent patients, hospitals can offer shorter-notice appointments in both nations, and patients are free to accept or reject them without penalty.)

And you should avoid changing your appointment in Scotland, even if you give them plenty of notice, because the hospital can use that as an opportunity to reset your clock to zero; if you change your appointment three times, they are normally expected to send you back to your GP (p.19). There are no such sanctions for changing appointments in England even if you give only short notice (p.28). In both nations, though, you can be taken off the list and sent back to your GP if you fail to attend your first outpatient appointment without giving notice (i.e. you ‘DNA’) (p.20, p.28).

If you are ever unavailable for treatment, either for medical or social reasons, then in Scotland your ‘clock’ is paused (p.22-25). This rule was very heavily applied (pp.10, 19) until a recent clampdown. In England the new main target (based on incomplete pathways: p.58) does not allow clock pausing at all, although clock pauses were certainly allowed and used against the previous main target.

Then there are patients who are completely excluded from the targets. For obvious reasons, both England and Scotland exclude obstetrics from their waiting time guarantees. If you are waiting for an organ transplant, then the wait for the organ itself is excluded in both nations. And if you want to become pregnant then assisted reproduction is covered in England, but not in Scotland. (p.13-4)

Both nations have short-wait guarantees for cancer outpatient appointments and initial treatment, but the English guarantee covers all cancers (pp.38-40) while in Scotland there are exclusions covering several cancer types (pp.15, 25-26). If you are having a course of cancer treatment then, in England, you are guaranteed your subsequent treatment within time limits, whether it’s surgery, chemotherapy or radiotherapy (pp.39-40); but there are no such guarantees in Scotland (p.5).

There are different exclusions in diagnostics as well. Scotland applies the 6-week guarantee only to eight key diagnostic tests (p.14), which means that English (but not Scottish) patients are guaranteed a 6-week wait for DEXA and various kinds of physiological measurement (p.8). However in both nations the diagnostic wait is part of the 18-week referral to treatment wait, so this may not make a massive difference in practice.

Why are the English rules apparently so much more patient-friendly and inclusive than the Scottish ones? I think the answer was right at the start: the nature of the waiting times targets.

In England, the overall targets have a tolerance, for instance that 92 per cent of patients on the waiting list must be within 18 weeks. That leaves an 8 per cent margin for the odd exceptions (and there will always be exceptions).

In Scotland, though, the legally-binding 12 week Treatment Time Guarantee is a 100 per cent target. There will still always be exceptions, so they must be allowed for in the rules; which means you need lots of rules.

Personally, I think the English approach is the better one. (And in case anyone north of the border is starting to suspect a national bias, I should say that I am Scottish and was born and brought up in Scotland.) Hard cases make bad law, and trying to define all the reasonable exceptions in the rules is inevitably going to be complex and imperfect. Better simply to allow a tolerance in the target and let the rules include everybody.