FactCheck: are hospital waiting lists too long?
Updated on 01 June 2007
Is spending a year on a hospital waiting list a distant memory or an all too familiar reality?
The Claim
"Ask when you last had to spend a year or more on a hospital waiting list?"
Resignation Speech, Trimdon Labour Club, May 10 2007
The background
The war on waiting lists has been one of the biggest achievements of the Blair era - no-one doubts that things have got better since the days when an eighteen month wait for a hip operation was a commonplace occurence.
But how much better have they got? Have they really improved so much that Mr Blair can promise that at the end of next year Labour will "effectively abolish waiting in the national health service"? (House of Commons, 23 May 2007)
Of course, it depends very much how you measure waiting - but research by FactCheck suggests waiting is still very much a normal experience in the NHS.
In fact, waiting more than a year is not unknown. According to one analysis of the statistics, conducted for Channel 4 FactCheck, no fewer than 37,600 people waited more than a year for treatment - and that's just inpatients.
The analysis
So how is this possible? How can Tony Blair imply that waiting more than a year is almost unknown, when statistics prepared by the health service itself suggest that it is a far from unknown experience?
The statistics Tony Blair uses are the Hospital Activity Statistics, which take a snapshot of the number of patients in a hospital at any particular time.
According to the figure for the fourth quarter of 2005/6, there were just 11 people waiting more than a year - as close to nothing as you could expect to get, and an amazing improvement given the position the service was in in the mid 1990s.
But the larger number comes from a different set: the hospital episode statistics. They track the whole of the patient journey to the point when the patient is actually admitted to hospital.
If you query how many people had to wait more than a year in 2005-6, you get the result 37,600 - quite a significant number.
There are a few caveats with this number: some of those people will have decided to delay their treatment themselves, by cancelling an operation, for example; some will have had their operations delayed for clinical reasons, such as obesity; and a small proportion will be the result of poorly inputted data.
It's still a matter of debate which figures give the best indication of what is actually happening. But the fact remains that many thousands are waiting more than 12 months for an operation, at a time when the PM is implying that such an occurance is unheard of.
West London GP Sarah Jarvis says that the experience of her patients does suggest that people are waiting more than 12 months for an op.
She told More 4 News: "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."
But by the same token, these numbers don't measure how many people have to wait more than 12 months for out patient treatment and diagnostic procedures.
But Blair has promised to cut the overall waiting time including diagnostics and outpatient treatment to 18 weeks - an extremely brave promise.
But even using the same set of statistics, you get a sense of how much progress the government has made. In 1997-8, the same figure was 183,000; for 2004-5, the figure was 48,000. So there has been a good deal of progress to reach the 2005-6 figure of 37,600.
But the task is not complete. People do still wait; the concept of waiting has not been abolished.
FactCheck rating: 3
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The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.
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The verdict
It's debatable that abolishing waiting lists absolutely is possible, or even a desirable end. Prioritising waiting lists at any cost draws money away from other services, such as physiotherapy, which may be just as important.
Ultimately, in a service such as medicine, where new and highly effective treatments are always becoming available, and an ageing population has ever-increasing need of them, there will always be some kind of rationing. And that means waiting.
That may be an uncomfortable message to sell to the government. But surely, the progress the government has on this issue is enough, without having to be massaged to appear more impressive than it is.
It's even more frustrating to have to wait for an operation if you're also being told you don't have to.
Sources
Hansard, 23 May 2007
Waiting Times Statistics, Department of Health
Other figures: Hospital Episode Statistics, via the Information Centre for health and social care.
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