10-week wait to see a hospital consultant

Doctors today condemned the "postcode lottery" Londoners experience when trying to get a hospital appointment.

New figures reveal patients living in some parts of the city must wait up to 60 per cent longer than those in other boroughs to get their first meeting with a consultant.

In the worst performing areas,

such as Redbridge, people face an average 10-week wait from seeing their GP to their first outpatient appointment. Some patients have to wait far longer.

Those fortunate enough to live in Bromley, however, wait an average six weeks.

A spokeswoman for the British Medical Association, the professional association for doctors, said: "These statistics show the huge variation patients have to deal with between different areas of one city, let alone nationwide. What we want to see in the NHS is equality but this is clearly not happening.

"Instead we are seeing different treatment depending on what postcode you live in."

According to the Department of Health statistics, the best performing primary care trusts in London in the three months to March were Bromley, Richmond, Ealing and Islington. All had an average wait of about six weeks.

At the other end of the scale patients in Redbridge, Newham and Barking and Dagenham waited up to 10 weeks. The figures-were released in a Parliamentary written answer.

In future, waiting times will be measured in terms of the length of time between GP referral and the operating theatre door. The move was welcomed by patient groups as a way of ending "hidden waits".

Under the old way of measuring waiting times, NHS managers were found to be hitting government targets by moving patients between various waitinglists. Health Secretary John Reid has pledged that by 2008 every patient will wait no longer than 18 weeks from their GP referral date to the day of their operation.

The BMA spokeswoman said: "We welcome the new measure of waiting times. But the target of treatment within 18 weeks is very ambitious and the NHS will need a huge increase in doctors and nurses to have any chance of hitting it."