Patients and relatives are being asked to share their experiences of waiting for planned operations. A Wales Audit Office survey, which launches today, will gather patient experiences from all corners of the country to help evaluate how the NHS in Wales is managing waiting times.

Auditor General for Wales, Huw Vaughan Thomas, said today:

This study aims to take a whole systems perspective to understand what contributes to waiting times for planned treatments and how things could be improved. This survey will give us valuable insight into how patients actually experience the system and what the NHS could do to make those experiences better. My team are keen to hear from as many people as possible so we can map performance across Wales.

The Wales Audit Office wants to hear from people who have had a planned operation in the last 3 years. They are interested in how long patients had to wait for operations, how they felt about the length of time they had to wait whether this had an impact on their health and how involved they felt in the decisions about their treatment.

This is the third study into NHS waiting times by the Auditor General for Wales, with the previous study in 2006 concluding that the NHS in Wales had made considerable progress in reducing long waiting times.

If you would like to share your experiences, you can do so online via the NHS waiting times survey website [Opens in new window]. The survey is very short and only takes a few minutes to complete. It is open for 5 weeks and closes at 4pm on 13 June 2014. The conversation around waiting times will also continue online via social media networks. You can take part by using the hashtag #NHSwaiting [Opens in new window] on Twitter or following the Wales Audit Office via Facebook [Opens in new window].