article: About half of trusts provided details of cancellations one to three days before admission. Hospitals must record cancellations on the day of an operation or of admission - but not those prior to that. But Ipswich Hospital has now said it will start keeping records of earlier cancellations. NHS England said official figures showed less than 1% of operations were cancelled at the last minute. By Caroline Parkinson, Health editor, BBC News website These figures shine a light on a hidden issue. Hospitals don't have to record these early non-medical cancellations, so the data provided by these 74 hospitals is the only indication we have of the extent of the problem. There is a view that the more notice a patient gets of a cancellation the better, because it allows more time to rearrange plans. But if operations are cancelled outside the official period, patients don't have the same rights to a date for their rescheduled operation. Of course, sometimes patients themselves cancel an operation at the last minute. And while very few hospitals had that data, the information from those that did suggest it could be a bigger problem than hospitals cancelling themselves. Official NHS England figures show about 7.7 million planned operations were carried out in England last year. There were 71,370 last-minute cancellations - either on the day the patient was meant to arrive, after they had arrived or on the day the operation was meant to take place. In each case, NHS rules say a patient should be offered a new date within 28 days. If that deadline is missed, hospitals are not paid for the operation, and it is recorded in official figures. However, operations cancelled outside of the official definition are not subject to the same rules. In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, the definition of last-minute cancellations is wider - and is taken over several days. The BBC asked all 156 NHS trusts in England, via a Freedom of Information request, to provide figures for operations cancelled one to three days before a patient was due to be admitted. Seventy-four provided data suggesting they had cancelled 41,474 operations within that period - as opposed to 33,400 last-minute cancellations recorded for the same trusts in the official figures. Iona Hevican from Cornwall waited a year for a planned hysterectomy operation, which was cancelled three times before it went ahead. She told the BBC: "Every time they give you a date to go in for your operation there's a lot of preparing before you go in for that date, so any cancellation that you get is obviously a very traumatic time because of all the plans that you made, all your mindset, everything. "Then just to say come back tomorrow, like you're nothing, like a piece of meat, then that's not good. "They have to realise what goes into planning. They have to plan, and we have to plan." The main reasons for cancellations were a lack of beds or ward space and staff shortages. For operations cancelled on the day, emergencies take priority - something that
summary: Tens of thousands of operations were cancelled by English hospitals last year but not officially counted, figures obtained by the BBC suggest.