Updates

The lack of published data on waiting times has long been on the agenda as a problem. Without publicly available data, it is not possible to monitor the availability of and access to care. The ombudsman first raised the need to measure and publish waiting time data for elective surgery in 2002 (State Comptroller’s Office, 2002). In 2007, the Parliament’s Research and Information Centre raised the issue again, citing evidence that waiting times for elective procedures varied significantly among hospitals, from two weeks to a year (Levy, 2007). In 2014, the Committee for Strengthening the Public Health System in Israel also recommended monitoring waiting times, as a precondition to implementing one of its recommendations for reducing elective surgery waiting times (MoH, 2014). As a response, the MoH planned to systematically measure and publish waiting times for elective procedures in hospitals as part of the periodic quality of care indicators in 2015 (MoH, 2015), but this was never implemented. In 2020, the MoH set a maximum waiting time of 21 days for certain elective procedures, which should be assessed by periodically published data (MoH, 2020). However, the policy was again not implemented. If waiting times continue to be unknown, increasing patients’ choice of hospital will not necessarily improve access to care (See Analysis “Free choice of hospitals reform”).