A research letter in the Future Healthcare Journal, laying out the scale of performance failings in the NHS, has attracted a lot of attention today. It has shone a spotlight on the fact that, to fulfil its pledge to voters to reduce waiting times and ‘fix the NHS’, Labour must somehow find a way to cut the health service’s treatment backlog in half.

The research explains that the NHS has a constitutional requirement that 92 per cent of patients must wait no longer than 18 weeks for treatment after being referred by their GP. That target was last met in November 2015. At that point, the total national waiting list was 3.5 million. By the end of 2024, it was 7.5 million.

NHS waiting lists are symptomatic of a system that is failing

After much statistical labour – ‘we leverage an equilibrium variant of a mathematical framework previously developed for modelling consultant-led elective waiting times’ – the authors conclude what common sense would have told them to begin with. The list needs to retreat to roughly its 2015 size. But, as a doctor from the Royal College of Physicians of London pointed out, in commenting on the research, the figures represent people living in pain, losing mobility, and slipping into more complex........

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