Freedom of information requests

Tier 4 weight management service

Questions

1. Does your Trust offer Tier 4 weight management services (e.g. bariatric surgery)? If the answer to this question is yes, please answer the following questions:
2. Please indicate your Trust’s total expenditure on Tier 4 weight management services over the past 5 years. Where data is not readily available, please provide as much data as possible within “the appropriate limit” defined in Section 12 of the FOI Act:
3. Please indicate the number of beds and average occupancy rate allocated for Tier 4 weight management services in your Trust over the past 5 years. Where data is not readily available, please provide as much data as possible within “the appropriate limit” defined in Section 12 of the FOI Act:
4. Please indicate the average waiting time from referral to treatment (RTT) for Tier 4 weight management services over the past 5 years, rounded to one decimal place. Where data is not readily available, please provide as much data as possible within “the appropriate limit” defined in Section 12 of the FOI Act:
5. Please indicate how many patients are currently, and at the end of each financial year, on your RTT waiting list for Tier 4 weight management services. Where data is not readily available, please provide as much data as possible within “the appropriate limit” defined in Section 12 of the FOI Act:

Response

It is likely that the Trust does hold the information you have requested however we are withholding it for the following reasons:
Section 12: Cost limit
Section 12 of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate limit, which for local government is set at £450. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending more than 18 hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
The information requested it is not held in a format that allows us to easily access and
extract the relevant data.
We estimate in order provide to provide a response it will take well in excess of the limit defined under the FOI Act.
We have identified 600 potentially relevant cases. Allowing for a conservative estimate of 5 minutes to open, review and close each case would equate to around 50 hours of staff times, which is well in excess of the limit defined under the FOI Act.
Unfortunately, we are unable to provide any advice on how to reduce the work to bring it within the appropriate limit due to the size of the request.
We are therefore exempting this information under Section 12 of the FOI Act.

1. Yes

2-5. Exempting this information under Section 12