Waiting list deaths 2020-2025

Reference: 24-25425

Date response sent: 28/01/2025

Details of enquiry

1. The number of patients who died while on your NHS waiting list and have therefore been removed from the list due to their death or status as being deceased in 2025 to date.
2. The number of patients who died while on your NHS waiting list, and have therefore been removed from the list due to their death or status as being deceased, broken down into the years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020.
3. If possible, I would also like a breakdown of ethnicity, religion, age and gender for every patient who died while on your NHS waiting list for each of these years, please.
   – If you don’t hold all of this data or if providing it would exceed costs, please provide as much information as possible – starting from the most recent year and working backwards.
4. Please also tell me the total number of people who are currently on your waiting list. – If possible, please provide a breakdown of ethnicity and religion for these patients.

Response sent

Explanatory Notes:

The data provided below relates to patients who were removed from the electronic patient records system by reason of their deaths, over the period 01/01/20 to 16/01/25.

The Trust recognises a high level of interest by the public on NHS waiting list management and must balance this against disclosure of small numbers of patients by the years in which their deaths occurred, which – whilst not directly identifying individuals, would nevertheless give rise to a disclosure of personal information.

1. We have masked low numbers as the symbol ‘≤5’, which indicates where numbers are equal to 5 or less than 5.
2. As we are a small Trust, there is a high chance of recognition and/or identification of particular patients by fellow patients or others from disclosure of small numbers (‘≤5’) of deaths by year and gender.
3. It is the NHS England standard not to provide data where patient numbers are less than 6 as this may lead to (albeit unintended) identification of individuals.

This is not a just a question of considering the means reasonably likely to be used by general public, but also the means likely to be used by a determined person with a particular reason to want to identify individuals from data in the public domain now or in the future, and/or gained from other sources.

4. The Trust adheres to both:

a. The Common Law Duty of Confidentiality, which restricts information relating to identification of individuals who may have received services from the Trust as confidential under the common law, and

b. The Duty of Confidence, which extends after the death of individualsSection 2: The common law of confidentiality and consent – NHS England Digital

The Trust recognises that the information you have requested might already be in the public domain, published under a different legal framework. This does not affect the Trust’s belief and adherence to the principles of confidentiality after death, as set out below.

1. The number of patients who died while on your NHS waiting list and have therefore been removed from the list due to their death or status as being deceased in 2025 to date.

In line with the remainder of your questions below, we have taken this question to be for the period 2020 to 2024.

Across the whole Trust 103 patients were removed from our current EPR (electronic patient record system during calendar years from 1^st January 2020 to 16 January 2025

2. The number of patients who died while on your NHS waiting list, and have therefore been removed from the list due to their death or status as being deceased, broken down into the years 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020.

Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust Deaths across all Departments 1st January 2020 to 16th January 2025
Year of Death	Gender Assigned at Birth	Age Bands								Annual Total
		under 10 yrs	10-16 yrs	17-24 yrs	25-34 yrs	35-44 yrs	45-54 yrs	55-64 yrs	65+ yrs
2020	F	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	7
	M	0	0	0	0	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5
	Other or not stated	0	0	0	0	0	≤5	0	≤5	≤5
2020 Total Waiting List Removals due to Deaths, Trustwide											14

 

Year of Death	Gender Assigned at Birth	Age Bands								Annual Total
		under 10 yrs	10-16 yrs	17-24 yrs	25-34 yrs	35-44 yrs	45-54 yrs	55-64 yrs	65+ yrs
2021	F	0	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	7
	M	0	0	≤5	0	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5
	Other or not stated	0	0	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	8
2021 Total Waiting List Removals due to Deaths, Trustwide											19

 

Year of Death	Gender Assigned at Birth	Age Bands								Annual Total
		under 10 yrs	10-16 yrs	17-24 yrs	25-34 yrs	35-44 yrs	45-54 yrs	55-64 yrs	65+ yrs
2022	F	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	7
	M	0	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	6
	Other or not stated	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	19
2022 Total Waiting List Removals due to Deaths, Trustwide											32

 

Year of Death	Gender Assigned at Birth	Age Bands								Annual Total
		under 10 yrs	10-16 yrs	17-24 yrs	25-34 yrs	35-44 yrs	45-54 yrs	55-64 yrs	65+ yrs
2023	F	0	0	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	≤5	0	6
	M	≤5	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	8
	Other or not stated	0	0	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	≤5	0	7
2023 Total Waiting List Removals due to Deaths, Trustwide											21

 

Year of Death	Gender Assigned at Birth	Age Bands								Annual Total
		under 10 yrs	10-16 yrs	17-24 yrs	25-34 yrs	35-44 yrs	45-54 yrs	55-64 yrs	65+ yrs
2024	F	0	0	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	≤5	0	≤5
	M	0	0	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	0	≤5	≤5
	Other or not stated	0	0	≤5	≤5	0	≤5	0	≤5	8
2024 Total Waiting List Removals due to Deaths, Trustwide											17

 

For the first 2 weeks of January 2025 no waiting list patients were removed due to their death.

3. If possible, I would also like a breakdown of ethnicity, religion, age and gender for every patient who died while on your NHS waiting list for each of these years,

please – If you don’t hold all of this data or if providing it would exceed costs, please provide as much information as possible – starting from the most recent year and working backwards.

1. The age and gender of deceased patients is provided in the data tables provided in our response to Q2 above.

As stated in the explanatory notes at the beginning of our response, we have masked numbers wherever they were equal to or less than 5.

1. The Trust confirms that Ethnicity and Religion data are not consistently recorded on the patients’ EPR and these are not mandatory fields.

Where held, this cannot be split out from the already small and therefore masked numbers without substantially increasing risk of patient identification and creating additional sets of masked numbers. As you will have seen above, the numbers within the data tables are largely masked throughout for reasons provided in the explanatory notes above..

4. Please also tell me the total number of people who are currently on your waiting list. – If possible, please provide a breakdown of ethnicity and religion for these patients.

The total number of people on the Trust’s waiting lists for all departments, as at 16/01/25 stood at 18,017.

The break-down of this data by ethnicity and religion is attached as both a csv file and also as a pdf file which may facilitate your reading of its content.

We note that you requested this data in excel format, however this Trust no longer provides data as excel spreadsheets/workbooks in order to mitigate risk to personal information.  This is in line with recent guidance issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office Information Commissioner’s Office – Advisory note to public authorities | ICO ,

NB: –

• We have masked all numbers which are equal to or less than 5 as the symbol  ≤5 as set out in the explanatory notes above.
• The Trust does not hold complete data for ethnicity and religion, as already explained in our response to Question 3b) above.