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England’s mammoth hospital waiting list is improving, with the number of people waiting 18 months or more for care halving over the last five weeks.
Official figures show around 20,000 people had been waiting at least 78 weeks for treatment on the 19th March. Just over a month before, that figure hovered around 40,000.
These numbers are still incredibly high compared to the waiting list before the pandemic, when waits of more than a year were highly unusual.
Various factors, including the pausing of non-urgent procedures when covid cases peaked, saw Englands’ overall waiting list grow to more than 7 million patients over the first three years of the pandemic. The length of time patients had been waiting also increased markedly.
But experts say the overall list was growing ahead of the pandemic, with one recent report suggesting some five million people would still be waiting for care even if Covid-19 hadn’t hit.
Patients are waiting for all manner of non-urgent procedures, from cataract surgery to hip replacements. Many will be in pain and experience serious limitations to their quality of life while they wait for care.
Industry experts have praised the efforts of hospital staff and managers for reducing the number of patients on this super-long waiting list. Hospitals are battling numerous challenges from an overstretched workforce to high demand and bed occupancy as they try to get on top of the backlog.
The recovery is also being hampered by ongoing industrial action, experts say. Nurses, junior doctors, ambulance staff and physiotherapists have all gone on strike on various dates in recent months.
Although pay deals are now on the table for some public health sector employees, junior doctors — qualified and with up to eight years’ clinical experience — are still embarking on strikes, with a four-day walkout planned for April.
With a recent 72-hour strike leading to some 181,000 cancelled appointments, April’s action — if it goes ahead — will be a significant hurdle for hospitals trying to reduce their lists.
Rory Deighton, who leads industry body NHS Confederation’s acute network, said i a statement: “The National Health Service (NHS) has done an amazing job, focusing on long waiters, and delivering at a time of intense pressure for the whole of the NHS.
“The 78-week backlog may well have been cleared by now had we not had a challenging winter, flu season, and the added distraction of industrial action. We are particularly concerned about the junior doctors’ strike scheduled for Easter where we estimate that up to 250,000 appointments may be cancelled. We are urging the government and BMA to sit down for meaningful discussions to resolve this.”
The overall waiting list itself remains stubbornly high, with some experts predicting England won’t see much significant movement this year. Researchers with the Institute of Fiscal Studies recently called ambitions to increase elective activity to target levels “increasingly unreachable” in a report published last month.
‘To its credit, the NHS has made real progress in its efforts to reduce the number of patients waiting a very long time for care, virtually eliminating waits for care of two years or more,” research economist Max Warner said in a statement.
“But efforts to increase treatment volumes have so far been considerably less successful. In the 10 months following the publication of the elective recovery plan, the NHS treated 5% fewer patients from the waiting list than over the same period in 2019,” he added.