Meeting targets has now become more important than treating patients in our hospitals, we are sometimes warned.

Whether you believe targets and tables to be time-consuming and misleading, or actually a valuable means of shedding light on the quality of hospital services to combat complacency and worse, you probably, at least, expected figures on which they are based to be accurate.

Anyone who reads our story this week about cancelled operations in Oxfordshire hospitals may from today be tempted to doubt this.

New figures suggest that the county’s major hospital trust cancelled more routine operations than any other trust in England. The statistics were published in a range of figures from NHS England.

Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, like other trusts, provided the information themselves.

Only now the OUHT is suggesting that we should not pay much notice to the statistics that it provided, because they are unvalidated and, almost certainly, incorrect.

It all comes down to the speed at which hospitals validate their cancelled operations data. If the figures demanded by NHS England are meaningless then NHS England should not put them out, allowing reputations of good hospitals to be unfairly damaged.

If trusts believe the way the figures are being assembled are misleading or just wrong they should make their anxieties known to the Government and patients through the media.

Otherwise, statistics designed to strengthen trust in our hospitals will achieve the very opposite.

And if the number of cancelled operations cannot be counted reliably, what other tables can actually be relied upon — maybe just the ones that show OUHT at the top of performance tables rather than at the bottom?