<qa>  What is the number of patients placed on the waiting list?For ethical reasons, care will be taken to avoid any risk of inequality between the patient groups. Such inequality might result if some patients should wait for access to treatment longer than normally or if short waiting times would accounted for more than half of the hospitals surgical capacity, for instance. The number of patients placed on the waiting list varies from one month to another, being specific to each hospital. Therefore no advance estimate can be made of the number of patients to be placed on the list. Consequently, the following arrangements will be made: 