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Still waiting at hospitals?

By Ben King

Updated on 01 June 2007

Tony Blair came to power promising to cut hospital waiting times - so do new figures tell us if he succeeded?


Tony Blair took office to the tune of 'Things can only get better.' And looking at today's waiting figures, that's how it turned out.

In the latest quarter, 85 per cent of hospital patients were seen within three months. Last year the number was 74 per cent - both a big improvement since the 1990s.

So no wonder Tony Blair mentioned waiting times in his farewell speech.

"Ask when you last had to spend a year or more on a hospital waiting list?"

So - we asked the NHS: How many people in England do spend twelve months waiting to go to hospital? The answer was rather surprising. 37,600.

That includes 1,689 hips, 2,425, and 515 heart operations.

So how can Tony Blair make his claim? Simple - he uses a different set of numbers.

Look at the stats Tony Blair prefers - the official 'Waiting List' which tracks patients using a different method, and you get a different number - just eleven.

Neither set of stats gives a perfect picture. The larger number includes some data entry errors. It includes people who wait longer because they don't show up for appointments, or they're delayed for other reasons - perhaps because they're too overweight. Exactly how many is not recorded. But people are waiting longer than a year.

"There's no question that over the last few years waiting lists have gone down, and fewer patients are waiting than they used to. But likewise I don't think there's any question that some patients are waiting more than 12 months."

Even using the less flattering method, things have got better. There were 183,000 people waiting in 1997, when Blair took office. For 2004/5, there were 48,000. And this year, it's 37,600. A definite improvement.

But even one of the architects of Blair's health policies, professor Julian Le Grand of the LSE, admits that the waiting list problem isn't solved yet.

"We have made an awful lot of effort to get waiting times down over the years. And actually now its beginning to pay off at least for various kinds of elective surgery, certain kinds of specialist surgery. They are still waiting in a lot of other areas, but I think maybe we are getting to an NHS where waiting is a thing of the past."

FactCheck: are hospital waiting lists too long?

Is spending a year on a hospital waiting list a distant memory or an all too familiar reality? The FactCheck crunch the numbers.
Read the report

But the cost has been enormous - the NHS budget has doubled in real terms.

And waiting, it seems, is still with us. As medicine gets more expensive and the population gets older... we may decide that waiting lists simply aren't a problem we can afford to solve.

"I doubt if we'll ever get rid of all waiting. We have a system basically where healthcare is free at the point of use. So demand is always going to exceed supply in the jargon. So you'll always be in a situation where there is some rationing, and some of that rationing is going to be by waiting."

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