NHS Waiting List Tops 7 Million for First Time Leaving 1 in 8 People in England Waiting for NHS Treatment

The NHS waiting list for routine operations has topped 7 million for the first time. This is up from 6.8 million in July and is the highest number since records began in August 2007. The Mail has more.

It means one in eight people in England are now waiting for NHS treatment. This figure includes almost 390,000 patients who’ve been forced to wait over a year for treatment.  This is up from 377,689 at the end of July, and is the equivalent of one in 18 people on the entire waiting list. 

It comes as after both the Government and NHS England pledged to eliminate all waits of more than a year by March 2025. Some 2,646 people in England have been waiting more than two years to start routine hospital treatment at the end of August. This is down slightly from 2,885 at the end of July and a peak of 23,778 in January 2022.

The Government and NHS England set the ambition to eliminate all waits of more than two years, except when it is the patient’s choice or for complex cases requiring specialist treatment, by July this year.

Meanwhile, more than 30,000 A&E patients faced 12-hour waits – a record high.

In addition to a raft of NHS data today there are reports that some heart attack patients are now facing an eight hour wait for an ambulance in some parts of the country.

Professor Mama Mamas, a consultant cardiologist in Stoke and Professor of Cardiology at Keele University, told the Independent the situation was a “shambles”.

“I was on call this weekend and I was seeing delays of eight hours. It was several people, three or four this weekend with heart attacks that waited between four and eight hours… it’s a national disgrace that we’re in this situation,” he said.

“For the first time in my career, I’ve publicly said, ‘maybe it’s better to just to get someone to drive you in’.”

NHS data itself shows average response time in September for ambulances in England dealing with the most urgent incidents, defined as calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries, was nine minutes and 19 seconds.

This is up from nine minutes and eight seconds in August, though below the record longest average response time for this category of nine minutes and 35 seconds, which was reached in July. The target standard response time for urgent incidents is seven minutes. 

Paramedics also took just under 48 minutes on average to respond to category two emergencies, which include heart attacks and strokes – more than double the target of 18 minutes.

Linked to the long waits for medical treatment, the number of people in the U.K. out of work due to long-term sickness has hit a record high of 2.5 million, leaving over a fifth of working age people now economically inactive for one reason or another.

Excess deaths for non-Covid reasons have also been running high since the spring, many of them heart and circulatory system related.

Britain is clearly not at all well and struggling to address all the health problems that are arising. What is responsible for the ill health and problems in the health service is not wholly clear, with different experts blaming the virus, the restrictions and the vaccines to varying degrees. The problems only look to be getting more acute as the winter approaches.