Yet another of Rishi Sunak’s five targets looks to have slipped out of reach. Waiting lists for NHS treatment in England have climbed to another record high and now stand just shy of 7.6 million. There was a slight improvement for the longest waits: those waiting more than a year dropped slightly but still stand at a staggering 383,000. A very unlucky 314 have found themselves languishing on the lists for more than two years. Ministers gave the NHS a target to clear waits of more than 65 weeks by April next year, but there’s been little progress on those either.
NHS managers were quick to blame strike action – Junior Doctors are set to walk out again over pay tomorrow from 7a.m. The health services’ figures point to over 100,000 appointments being postponed in June alone. Overall, the NHS says, nearly 800,000 appointments have now been rescheduled due to strikes. Industrial action may offer Sunak a way out of his pledge.
Elsewhere, the NHS is on course for its busiest summer ever. A&Es in England have seen their second busiest July on record with 2.1 million patients showing up – though that’s still fewer than the last July before the pandemic hit. When combined with June, though, it adds up to over 4.4 million attendances which would be the busiest summer for emergency departments ever (the previous high being the summer of 2022). The ambulance service also experienced its busiest month since May last year with just under 700,000 incidents in July.
There was better news in tests and diagnostics: with a record month for cancer checks and 16 per cent more general diagnostic tests carried out in June than the same month pre-pandemic. The NHS also looks on track to hit its target of 10,000 so-called ‘virtual ward beds’ available by September, with the current figure now at 9,713. These virtual ward beds mean people stay at home and receive remote care from medical staff, freeing up beds inside hospitals.
With autumn approaching, it’s hard to see how the NHS and Sunak can pull this one back. Painfully slow progress is being made on the longest waits, and all the while new patients join the backlog. What’s more, forecasts by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others expect the lists to keep climbing well into next year. It seems for Rishi this will be another target missed.
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