England’s Hospital Procedure Wait List Edges Up To 7.07 Million

Millions are waiting for non-urgent hospital procedures in England, as providers battle continued staff and bed shortages.

The latest official data shows 7.07m planned elective treatments are yet to be performed, with an increasing number of people waiting more than a year for procedures.

This is a rise of around 700,000 on the previous month’s data and — for the 29th month in a row — the largest ever total waiting list.

Those on the list will be waiting for a wide range of treatments from cataract surgery to hip replacements. Many of these patients will be in pain and face restrictions on their day-to-day lives while they wait for procedures.

The waiting list was already rising before the pandemic, hitting more than 4.4 million in February 2020. But experts say covid-19 has exacerbated an already-vulnerable health system. An analysis from think tanks the Nuffield Trust and the Health Foundation estimated the waiting list would have passed 5 million by now if the pandemic had never happened.

Looming nurses’ strikes look set to push the elective wait list even higher with some surgeries and other procedures likely to be cancelled when they go ahead.

Commenting on the latest figures, Nuffield Trust deputy director of research Sarah Scobie said health staff faced “a very difficult winter ahead,” with flu and further covid-19 spikes likely to create even more pressure.

She called on politicians to provide extra winter funding to help hospitals cope, specifically asking Jeremy Hunt, the country’s Chancellor and a former health secretary, to “be very clear about the pain that patients and staff will feel from squeezing the NHS budget any further.”

Leaders are set to announce a new government spending budget next week.

How many patients are actually waiting?

In reality, the number of people actually waiting for treatments will be lower — perhaps significantly so — than the headline 7.07m figure. This is because some patients will counted multiple times if they are waiting for more than one procedure. NHS England records the total number of “incomplete pathways” rather than the specific number of patients waiting.

The body’s elective recovery chief Jim Mackey recently said the actual number of people waiting was likely to be around 5.5 million.

He told the King’s Fund annual conference that health bosses were going to probe this figure more deeply, HSJ reported. “Sometimes there are people on twice, where they need one thing then another thing. Other times it’s a bit more complicated… We’re just about to start a process with a handful of organisations to try and work out what that means,” he said.