The number of people in England waiting to start routine hospital treatment has risen to a record high, and waits at A&E, for cancer care and for ambulances to arrive are also worsening.
At the end of December, almost 6.1 million people were waiting to have an operation – the highest number since records began in August 2007.
The number of people forced to wait more than 52 weeks to start non-urgent treatment was 310,813, up from 306,996 in the previous month and 39% higher than in December 2020. A total of 20,065 had waited for more than two years. Overall, 92% of patientswaiting are those meant to be treated within 18 weeks.
“These figures show that sadly millions of patients and their families will be waiting anxiously or in pain for routine or planned surgery for some considerable time to come,”said Sarah Scobie, the deputy director of research at the Nuffield Trust thinktank.
NHS England’s figures come two days after it published its elective recovery plan, setting out how it hopes to cut waiting times. It plans to tackle the backlog through the use of community diagnostic centres where people can have tests such as scans and X-rays, and surgical hubs, which carry out large numbers of the same type of operation such as joint replacements.
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, told MPs that the NHS planned to treat everyone who had been waiting for surgery for more than two years by July and eradicate 18-month waits by April 2023, 65-week waits by March 2024, and one-year waits by March 2025.
But the waiting list would keep on growing until March 2024, he added, because up to 10 million people who did not seek medical help during the pandemic were doing so in greater numbers, increasing the demand for NHS care.
There is growing unease in Downing Street and among Conservative MPs that stubbornly high waiting lists could prove a problem in the run-up to the next election, which is due in May 2024. Ministers have been given estimates that the headline total of the waiting list could reach as many as 10.7 million people, or 9.2 million under the best case scenario, by spring 2024.
The Guardian disclosed this week that in the first seven months of 2021-22, 290,428 people in England with possible symptoms of cancer did not get to see a specialist within the 14 days after being referred by a GP that the NHS seeks to guarantee, and the total could hit almost 500,000 – more than double the previous biggest annual tally of 235,549 – by the end of March.
The latest monthly figures show that more than 400,000 people had to wait longer than two weeks during 2021 to see a specialist while 33% – the most ever – had to wait more than 62 days to start treatment. Performance against the series of cancer waiting times has been “going from bad to worse over the last year”, said Minesh Patel, the head of policy at Macmillan Cancer Support.
Almost 300,000 people with heart problems are now waiting for surgery, such as having a stent fitted to keep open damaged arteries.
“Hundreds of thousands of real people [are] at higher risk of avoidable heart attacks, disabling heart failure or even premature death as they face dangerous delays for potentially life-saving heart care,” said Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, a cardiologist and the British Heart Foundation’s associate medical director.
