Patients on the waiting list of a London teaching hospital.

This paper is the second to result from a one-year study at St. Thomas' Hospital, London conducted in 1965-6, a full report of which study (Bithell, 1968) has been presented to the Governors of the Hospital. Any study of hospital waiting lists needs to distinguish carefully between statistics relating to patients on a waiting list at any time and those relating to patients admitted to or taken off the waiting list in a given period. For example, a sample of patients on a waiting list at a particular time will generally yield a different distribution of waiting times from that of patients leaving the list (for admission or otherwise) over a given period. This is because in the former case the patients have not completed their term of waiting and because, in addition, the longer such patients wait, the higher their chance of being included in the sample. (In some circumstances the one distribution may be estimated from the other, but the process is not straightforward and it is preferable to collect the data appropriate to the enquiry in hand.) Simple counts of waiting list lengths are of the former, 'list-oriented' type. The St. Thomas' study, however, was mainly based on 'patient oriented' information (Bithell, 1969a) and this has resulted in analyses largely geared to the experiences of patients actually admitted to the hospital or removed from the waiting list. For this reason, the majority of this paper is concerned with information on the patients: only the next section refers to the actual sizes of the lists observed. Some organizational points are discussed in the last section.