Gastroenterology appointments (FOI)

​Request

The published statistics for outpatient waiting times on gov.je appear to show that no patients triaged as routine were seen by the Gastroenterology specialty from March to July 2020.

I would like to know how many patients triaged as routine have been seen for the first time by the consultants, each month for the 2 period August 2018 to July 2020.

Response

This table shows the number of outpatient gastroenterology appointments seen by the Gastroenterology Consultants from August 2018 to July 2020.

Appointments are broken down by new (first) and follow-up.
Gastroenterology Appointments

The Department have determined that where numbers are less than five, to provide the specific number of appointments would likely breach the privacy of the individuals. Article 25 (Personal Information) of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has therefore been applied.

All new referrals are triaged by one of our clinicians and patients assigned to attend outpatient’s clinic or endoscopy depending on symptoms and results of tests done in primary care. Those triaged to attend outpatient clinics are assigned, according to clinical priority to one of the following categories:

• Urgent
• Soon
• Routine

Patients of the same clinical priority are appointed in chronological order i.e. the patients who have been waiting longest will be seen first. There are instances where a patient’s clinical priority may change, resulting in an earlier appointment. This is usually due to new information regarding the clinical status of a patient being provided to the department.

Recent work to improve the waiting list position has led to the recruitment of an additional consultant gastroenterologist due to start in January 2021, and an Associate Specialist Doctor with experience in gastroenterology due to start in November 2020.

Articles Applied

Article 25      Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018.

(2)     Information is absolutely exempt information if –
(a)     it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018; and
(b)     its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

(3)     In determining for the purposes of this Article whether the lawfulness principle in Article 8(1)(a) of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2018 would be contravened by the disclosure of information, paragraph 5(1) of Schedule 2 to that Law (legitimate interests) is to be read as if sub-paragraph (b) (which disapplies the provision where the controller is a public authority) were omitted.