More than 120,000 people in England died last year while on the NHS waiting list for hospital treatment, figures obtained by Labour appear to show.
That would be a record high number of such deaths, and is double the 60,000 patients who died in 2017/18.
For example, the Royal Free hospital in London said it had had 3,615 such deaths, while there were 2,888 at the Morecambe Bay trust in Cumbria and 2,039 at Leeds teaching hospitals trust.
Hospital bosses said the deaths highlighted the dangers of patients having to endure long waits for care and reflected a “decade of underinvestment” that had left the NHS with too few staff and beds.
Healthwatch England, a patient advocacy group that scrutinises NHS performance, said the number of people dying while waiting for care was “a national tragedy”.
Louise Ansari, the chief executive, said: “We know that delays to care have significant impacts on people’s lives, putting many in danger.”
Dr Emma Runswick, the British Medical Association’s deputy chair of council, said the fatalities were a “terrible indictment of this government’s mismanagement of our health services”.
Labour asked 138 health trusts how many patients had died during 2022 while they were on the NHS waiting list. Of those, 35 (25%) responded, showing that 30,611 such deaths had occurred.
Labour then extrapolated that figure to estimate that across England as a whole, 120,695 people had died while awaiting hospital care, such as a hip or knee replacement.
“Record numbers of people are spending their final months in pain and agony, waiting for treatment that never arrives,” said Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary. “The basic promise of the NHS – that it will be there for us when we need it – has been broken.”
But NHS England criticised the way Labour reached their conclusions and insisted that they were unreliable and misleading.
“This analysis, based on figures from just a quarter of hospital trusts, does not demonstrate a link between waits for elective treatment and deaths, and it would be misleading to suggest it does, given the data does not include the cause of death or any further details on the person’s age and medical conditions,” an NHS spokesperson said.
However, groups representing doctors did not raise any concerns about the accuracy of the figures. They said the deaths were closely linked to the intense pressure hospitals were under and the widespread lack of staff that was hampering the NHS’s efforts to provide timely care and cut the waiting list, which has now risen to 7.6 million people – by far the largest number on record.
“These figures are extremely worrying as waiting lists are highly likely to continue to rise, potentially reaching the 9 million predicted by [ex-health secretary] Sajid Javid. Every one of those has symptoms that may become increasingly unbearable”, said Dr Tim Cooksley, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine.
Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents trusts, said that Covid-19 would have been a factor in some of the estimated 120,695 deaths, but the key cause was the fact that the NHS has been left with far too few resources to deal with the demand it is facing.
“These figures are a stark reminder about the potential repercussions of long waits for care,” Taylor said. “They are heartbreaking for the families who will have lost loved ones and are deeply dismaying for NHS leaders who continue to do all they can in extremely difficult circumstances.”
A Royal Free London spokesperson said: “There is nothing to indicate that waiting for an elective procedure contributed to or caused the death of the patients captured in this data. A routine review of patients waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment at the Royal Free London confirmed that none came to severe harm or died as a result of their wait.
“We have recently made significant progress in reducing waiting times and many of our services continue to run additional clinics and surgical lists during evenings and weekends so patients are seen as soon as possible. We always prioritise patients according to clinical need.”
Meanwhile, separate NHS figures showed that some hospitals have fewer beds per 1,000 people in their area than countries such as Mexico and Colombia.
Research by the House of Commons library for the Liberal Democrats showed that England has 2,233 (6%) fewer beds than it had in 2015, despite a sharp increase in patients’ need for care.
The Homerton hospital in east London has just 0.9 beds for every 1,000 local people. That is even fewer than in Mexico, which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says has the lowest number of beds per capita in the world. The Homerton has 41.4% fewer beds than eight years ago, the library found.
• This article was amended on 31 August 2023 to add a response from the Royal Free hospital in London.
