Scottish hospitals struggling with capacity cancelled more than 500 operations in October, new statistics have revealed.
During the month 2,600 planned operations across NHS Scotland were cancelled, with 522 (one in five) being blamed on hospitals' capacity and non-clinical reasons.
READ MORE: Glasgow's health board has been forced to cancel 324 operations
Amid rising numbers of planned operations - 30,535, up from 28,706 during October 2017 - the proportion of cancelled procedures has remained consistent at 8.5%.
Patients cancelled 986 (3.2%) of the operations, while hospitals say they cancelled 957 (3.1%) for clinical reasons. The remaining 135 surgical procedures were cancelled for unspecified reasons.
The report from the Information Services Division Scotland also revealed the levels of cancellations ranged from 5.1% to 11.4% across individual NHS Boards.
Scottish Liberal Democrat health spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP said: "Hundreds of patients have had their operations cancelled in October alone through no fault of their own.
"Cancelled operations cause huge disruption to the lives of patients and their families. They can be detrimental to people's physical and mental health too. When you have waited for an operation, often in pain or discomfort, it's a huge blow to find out it has been cancelled.
"Winter is beginning to bite which brings increasing pressures on our health service.
"The Health Secretary must ensure that hard-working NHS staff can get on with their work safe in the knowledge they have sufficient resources to get the job done."
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