Number of patients facing 18-month wait for NHS care rises in England
Patients are facing “unacceptably long” waits for care, health experts have warned, as new figures show the NHS going backwards on some of its key targets.
NHS England data for November published on Thursday showed that despite a small drop, more than 6 million people were waiting for treatment and hundreds of thousands have been waiting for more than one year.
About 6.39 million patients were waiting for 7.61 million treatments, down from 6.44 million patients and 7.71 million treatments at the end of October. It is the second month the waiting list has fallen.
But the number of patients waiting more than 18 months to start routine treatment at the end of November was 11,168, up from 10,506 at the end of October. In all, more than 355,000 patients have been waiting more than a year for hospital treatment.
Patients needing urgent care were also seen less quickly, the data shows. The NHS recovery plan sets a target for 76% of patients attending A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. But 69.4% of patients in England were seen within four hours in A&E in December 2023, down from 69.7% in November. And more than 44,000 patients had to wait more than 12 hours in English A&E departments to be admitted to hospital, up from 42,854 in November.
Ambulance response times also slowed. On average, ambulances took eight minutes and 44 seconds to respond to the most urgent calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries in December, up from eight minutes and 32 seconds in November and significantly longer than the target standard response time of seven minutes.
They also took longer (on average 45 minutes and 57 seconds) to respond to emergency calls such as heart attacks, strokes and sepsis, when the target is 18 minutes.
In January 2023, the prime minister announced a plan to avoid another NHS winter crisis. He pledged to create another 5,000 beds in English hospitals before winter and reduce bed occupancy rates. But the figures show that well into winter, there were only 4,203 extra beds, while bed occupancy rates have increased since Christmas to 93.2%.
NHS leaders conceded progress in some areas was “slipping” and called for more funding.
Sir Julian Hartley, the chief executive at NHS Providers, said: “Although progress on key recovery targets across urgent and emergency care has slipped, NHS leaders still aim to meet these by the end of March. Better funding for services and an urgent resolution to industrial action is vital to ensure the NHS can get through this winter and beyond.”
Tim Gardner, assistant director of policy at the Health Foundation charity, said: “Today’s data shows that patients continue to experience unacceptably long waits for hospital treatment, despite a welcome reduction in the waiting list for routine operations.
“In December, over 44,000 patients spent over 12 hours waiting on trolleys in A&E departments as no bed was available – 10 years ago, the number was 21.”
Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of the King’s Fund, said: “The NHS is still not meeting the majority of its most important performance targets this winter … Patients are still not receiving an acceptable level of service.
“To end this cycle of poor performance, the government must make long-term decisions to put the service back on track year-round. This includes making health and care a more attractive place to build a career, bolstering out-of-hospital care such as primary, community and social care services, and helping people live healthier lives through a focus on preventing ill health.”
The health and social care secretary, Victoria Atkins, said: “November was the first month without industrial action for over a year and we reduced the total waiting list by more than 95,000 – the biggest decrease since December 2010, outside of the pandemic.
“This shows the progress our fantastic NHS staff can make towards bringing waiting lists down when they don’t have to contend with industrial action.
“We want to put an end to damaging strikes once and for all, and if the BMA junior doctors committee can demonstrate they have reasonable expectations, I will still sit down with them.”