Eight in ten Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) in England failed to share such cosmetic surgery data requested under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act. Just 15.33% of the PCTs in the country have responded fully* and in a timely manner to an FoI asking for the number and cost of cosmetic operations they fund.
Over 150 NHS individual PCTs and clusters were asked in January for any "information" held on "hospital episodes of cosmetic surgery" including, but not restricted to, the following:
- types of cosmetic operations that were conducted;
- details of reasons for carrying out the operations;
- any details on the operations;
- a breakdown of costs;
- a list of hospitals they were carried out in.
Five months on, most failed to provide this data.
According to the NHS website, cosmetic procedures are rarely funded. Coupled with the "clinical reasons" requirement (that any individual seeking such an operation would need to fulfil) it made for the most common explanation provided by PCTs in their replies.
As such, since cosmetic surgery is funded only in exceptional circumstances and for clinical reasons (never cosmetic), the FoIs came back saying that the NHS doesn't "routinely" pay for such procedures and in some instances an additional internal policy outlining the conditions needed to get such a procedure on the NHS was attached.
The map below shows which PCTs did provide the required data, in a reasonably accessible format and in a timely manner. You can access the Fusion Table behind it here. Please note that a few PCTs are not represented on the map as no kml files were found for their boundaries. If you come across these, please contact me so we can update the map. The full record of complete (Y) and incomplete (N) responses can be viewed in this spreadsheet (draft).
Further posts will outline more results from this data.
As always ideas, feedback and comments are much appreciated.
*i.e. Provided reasonably acessible figures (data)
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