Labour ‘misled' public over NHS waiting lists
Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, had said the 260,000 drop in the NHS backlog since the general election 'was not a coincidence', adding that it was because of 'record investment and fundamental NHS reform'.
But a new Quality Watch report – a joint project between the Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation think tanks – found 245,000 appointments were being removed every month because patients died, had treatment elsewhere or moved abroad, rather than because treatment had finished.
Some 2.4 million appointments and operations have been removed from the NHS backlog since Labour took power as part of a so-called 'validation process', which involves deleting any appointments for patients hospitals no longer think need to be seen.
The researchers had to calculate the figures manually because they are not explicitly reported in NHS data, and said ministers should be more 'transparent' in their paper, first reported by the Health Service Journal on Wednesday.
They calculated the total removals by looking at the number of appointments taken from the 'expected waiting list' that then did not appear in the 'reported waiting list' as either waiting or having finished treatment.
The authors pointed out that even the NHS's 'own data shows it is still treating fewer patients than are being referred'.
'Government was not clear'
For example, when Mr Streeting said the waiting list had fallen during April 'for the first time in 17 years', the researchers pointed out that on an average working day that month, there were 13,141 people being added to the backlog but 14,608 being deleted without undergoing treatment.
The Quality Watch report said the Government does not make the impact of validation and other 'unreported removals' sufficiently clear.
The research, authored by Georgia Watson and Dr Elizabeth Fisher of the Nuffield Trust, said: 'Until more transparent reporting is provided, accountability around unreported removals remains impossible and the planned care waiting list will continue to be a misleading indicator of how the NHS is dealing with demand.
'While the waiting list has started to go down, unreported removals have gone up. In fact, they have repeatedly outnumbered the additional incomplete referrals that join the waiting list every month,' they wrote.
'This tells us that, across several months, there were more [appointment referrals] being removed from the waiting list without being marked as complete than [new referrals] joining the list.'
They said the monthly removals of almost a quarter of a million equate 'to around 3 per cent of the waiting list'.
Patients who no longer need appointments have always been removed from the waiting list but they have recently had a 'more noticeable impact'.
'Since September 2023, this shift has helped the NHS get control of the waiting list, even while according to its own data it is still treating fewer patients than are being referred,' the report said.
'We are freeing up capacity'
A Department of Health spokesman said: 'Our drive to clear the huge waiting list backlog we inherited includes making sure all patients are getting the right treatment as quickly as possible.
'That's why we are supporting GPs to seek specialist advice before making referrals, and screening existing waiting lists to check that all patients need to be on there, freeing up capacity to get more people seen more quickly.
'This is one element of our wider work to cut waiting times for patients and improve productivity through our Plan for Change, through which we have already delivered over 4 million extra appointments and cut the waiting list by 260,000.'
An NHS spokesman said: 'NHS staff have made significant progress in reducing waiting lists in the last year – down by more than 260,000 since June 2024 – and this is driven by the fact that 2,300 more patients are receiving treatment every day compared to last year.
'While the validation process has a small impact on the overall waiting list – as is made crystal clear in our published monthly waiting list data – it's right we regularly clinically review those waiting so hospitals can prioritise patients more accurately and deploy their resources efficiently.'
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