PATIENTS requiring emergency surgery are being denied the best treatment because of political meddling designed to cut waiting lists for routine operations, a leading surgeon has claimed.

Professor Charles Court-Brown, an orthopaedic surgeon at Edinburgh royal infirmary, has accused ministers and NHS managers of sacrificing the needs of emergency patients by using scarce resources to meet “artificial” waiting list targets.

Andy Kerr, the health minister, has pledged that by the end of this year no patients will have to wait longer than 18 weeks for treatment. As a result, Court-Brown claims ward beds and surgeons are being reserved for planned operations in specialisms where there are long waiting lists, to the detriment of emergency patients.

“The introduction of waiting list initiatives and targets has resulted in the concentration of resources in politically important medical disciplines,” he said.

“This has inevitably meant that other medical disciplines, many of which involve emergency or unplanned admissions, have diminished resources.”

According to Court-Brown, shorter training times for junior doctors and the amount of lucrative private work carried out by surgeons are compounding the problem.

“There are increasing numbers of surgeons employed simply to do elective or nonemergency work but very few surgeons are employed only to undertake emergency work.”

Court-Brown’s criticism, which is sure to embarrass Labour, follows the claim last year by Clive Davis, chairman of the British Medical Association’s Scottish consultants committee, that surgeons had been asked by NHS managers to postpone cancer operations in order to bring down waiting lists for wisdom teeth extractions.

Court-Brown, who condemns the policy in The Surgeon, the journal of the royal colleges of surgeons of Edinburgh and Ireland, claims the Scottish executive and health service planners have seriously underestimated the level of emergency surgery carried out in Scotland.

According to his research, emergency operations account for 40% of all surgery performed in Scotland.

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