“A mental health trust will review patients not seen by its services for more than a year after a woman died having waited 13 months for a follow-up appointment.”, reports the Health Service Journal.

The death was the subject of a coroner’s Prevention of Future Deaths Report, concerning a woman with long term mental illness, who took her own life earlier this year while her follow-up appointment was delayed due to staffing shortages.

Long waits in mental health do not get enough attention in the NHS. Many mental health trusts do not even report their referral-to-treatment (RTT) waiting times, and NHS England don’t make them. Follow-up delays do not get enough attention either, and the rule that overdue follow-ups should start RTT waiting time ‘clocks’ is widely ignored – that rule is not enforced either.

So this woman’s death sits at the intersection of two kinds of ‘hidden waiting list’ in the NHS. At the moment, even the published waiting lists are so bad that this goes largely unnoticed. But as the new government starts to reduce those published waiting times, people will start noticing these other areas where patients are waiting far too long.

Overdue follow-up appointments are a large-scale problem right across the NHS. Both acute and mental health trusts struggle to track these patients – many cannot even count them. They are by definition time-limited, so when they are overdue they are at risk. Making these patients visible and tracking them accurately is therefore a clinical safety issue.

This is something that Insource have expertise at. No matter which PAS/EPR a trust uses, we can create a fully standardised view of the data and connect our accurate patient tracking system to it. We work in the acute, community and mental health sectors, and track RTT and non-RTT pathways.

So if you are worried about overdue follow-ups at your hospital, then get in touch. We’ll work with you, to make sure you are not left exposed when these hidden waiting times come to the fore.