Patients around the country - many of them children - are having to wait more than the government's agreed time limit of 18 months for surgery, following difficulties buying disposable equipment for tonsillectomies.

Seventy-three patients in England have been waiting more than 18 months for ear, nose and throat surgery, and the lists are building up as the Department of Health tries to source sufficient quantities of the instruments needed for the operation.

It follows a government decision in January that, because of the potential risk of spreading Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease by reusing equipment, all routine tonsillectomies should be postponed until the appropriate disposable equipment was available.

But the decision has inevitably had a knock-on effect on waiting list figures, with many hospitals, particularly in the South East, breaching the 18-month wait barrier set out as the absolute maximum in the NHS plan.

All the trusts spoken to by HSJ said that, faced with no equipment, they have been unable to do the operations, unless it is an emergency, in which case the old, reusable equipment will be used.

Some, such as Milton Keynes, have scheduled some operations for the beginning of June, when more equipment should be available.

Others say they cannot use private sector provision to clear the backlog as private hospitals cannot access the equipment either.

Four companies make the disposable instruments and, so far, 3,000 pieces have been distributed to the NHS. The companies are expected to manufacture as many as 70,000 instruments a year to meet the demand for operations.

ENT surgeon Ian Mackay, president of the British Association of Otorhinolaryngologists, Head and Neck Surgeons, said private patients are waiting as long for treatment as NHS.

'I think the DoH did the right thing to postpone the operations, ' he said. 'But everything that has happened subsequently could have been expected. We knew the waiting list was bound to go up.

The DoH recommended that in the meantime we should get on with other things. Hopefully, eventually it will balance out. '

Waiting times for the financial year ending in March were also skewed by the situation at Stoke Mandeville Hospital trust, where it was discovered that there were at least 135 patients waiting longer than 18 months for surgery.

The patients had been wrongly placed on the 'suspended' list and chief executive Sue Nichols has been moved to Buckinghamshire HA while a review of the situation is conducted. Fifty-two of the patients have come off the list because they no longer want their operation or their consultant no longer thinks it necessary; 33 have had surgery; 10 are booked in for their operations; and 12 are booked to see a consultant in outpatients. The remainder of the patients are still on the list, but either had to postpone their operation or have to wait because they have developed a medical condition which makes their operation more risky.