Number of people waiting for NHS treatment may be ‘more than twice as long as official list’

[dutchman]

Analysis seen by this paper shows that the current method of counting is vastly underestimating the true scale of the problem



The number of people waiting for NHS treatment may be twice the figures being reported, with millions missing from official data, the Telegraph has learned.

Analysis seen by this paper shows that the current method of counting vastly underestimates the true scale of the problem, with some patients lost in the system or removed before treatment is complete.

Latest official figures show that a record 6.4 million patients were waiting for treatment in March, one in 10 of the population, an increase of three per cent since February.

But the Telegraph understands the true figure may be closer to 13 million, almost one in five people in Britain.

Insiders have warned that hospitals are being incentivised to bring patients in for a first appointment and get them off the waiting list quickly, even though they may still require many months of treatment or operations.

The NHS considers a patient removed from the waiting list once they are seen following a Referral for Treatment (RTT), usually from a GP. Yet if they cannot make that appointment, some trusts are automatically removing them from the waiting lists.

Experts also warned that the RTT definition is so loose that an appointment with a consultant who decided to keep a health condition under surveillance could also count as treatment - knocking a patient off the waiting list - even if they required further help later.

The clock also stops with the first course of treatment - meaning that a patient given painkillers for a knee complaint, could be counted as “treated” despite facing a wait of many years for surgery to address the real problem.

Robert Ede, head of health and care at Policy Exchange, said it was impossible to estimate the true waiting list because of the bureaucratic chaos.

“The data is a complete mess,” he said. “One NHS trust looking at it found 15 per cent of the information was completely incorrect - patients who are duplicates, or errors or in some cases, dead.”

The Telegraph also discovered that some hospitals are cancelling entire morning or afternoon theatre sessions if only a handful of patients are booked in, to keep their utilisation rates high.

And analysts found that some patients were missing entirely from waiting lists

“It’s cancer patients and they were still waiting, and they always would have been waiting,” a source told the Telegraph. “It’s really scary.”