Is NHS shake-up a cure or yet more sticking plasters?

With the health and social care secretary Wes Streeting having played the role of media warm-up act over the weekend, Keir Starmer has announced some radical moves to reduce NHS waiting times and generally improve the service - and thus fulfil Labour's manifesto promise that "patients should expect to wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral for consultant-led treatment of non-urgent health conditions”.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Sadly, waiting times remain at near-record levels, and the current winter crisis, driven by high levels of flu and other seasonal respiratory illnesses, has highlighted once again the scale of the task and public concern. It’s a complicated picture, success cannot be assumed, and the fate of the government crucially depends on fixing it…

How bad is it?

The most commonly quoted figures are for “elective care” – crucial but not accident or emergency treatment, including surgery, for a wide range of illnesses, from, say, cancer to correcting an ingrown toenail. This is also what is focused on in the “18 weeks” limit enshrined in the NHS constitution, and the Labour manifesto. The government recently added a new interim target: “65 per cent of patients will be treated within 18 weeks by the end of next year. Based on the size of the current waiting list, that would mean a fall of more than 450,000 people waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment.”

In this context, then:

The NHS England waiting list stands at 7.54 million cases, or 6.34 million individual patients waiting for treatment (some needing more than one). The leak revealed:

About 3 million of these patients have been waiting over 18 weeks

Some 234,900 of these patients have been waiting over a year

A typical waiting time for treatment is 14.2 weeks – almost double the pre-Covid median wait of 7.6 weeks in October 2019