Measuring and Comparing Health Care Waiting Times in OECD Countries

Waiting times for elective (non-emergency) treatments are a key health policy concern in severalOECD countries. This study describes common measures on waiting times across OECD countries fromadministrative data. It focuses on common elective procedures, like hip and knee replacement, and cataractsurgery, where waiting times are notoriously long. It provides comparative data on waiting times acrosstwelve OECD countries and presents trends in waiting times in the last decade. Waiting times appear to below in the Netherlands and Denmark. In the last decade the United Kingdom (in particular England),Finland and the Netherlands have witnessed large reductions in waiting times which can be attributed to arange of policy initiatives, including higher spending, waiting-times target schemes, and incentivemechanisms which reward higher levels of activity. The negative trend in these countries has howeverhalted in recent years and in some cases reverted. The analysis also emphasizes systematic differencesacross different waiting-time measures, in particular between the distribution of waiting times of patientstreated versus the one of patients on the list. For example, the mean waiting time of patients on the list isgenerally higher than the mean waiting time of patients treated though we can find examples of theopposite. Mean waiting times are systematically higher than median waiting times and the difference canbe quantitatively large.