Sunak ‘highly unlikely’ to meet promise to cut NHS waiting lists, warn health leaders

Rishi Sunak is “highly unlikely” to meet his promise to cut NHS waiting lists, health leaders have warned, as a “sobering” analysis suggests the backlog will rise to 8 million and won’t begin to fall until next summer.

The prime minister vowed in January that “NHS waiting lists will fall” as he outlined five pledges upon which he staked his premiership. The backlog was 7.2 million at the time. It is now 7.75 million, the highest since records began in 2007.

But a grim report published today by the Health Foundation, an independent thinktank, will pile further pressure on Sunak over the NHS. The 15-page analysis predicts that the waiting list for hospital treatment in England will continue to rise for at least 10 months and ultimately top 8 million, regardless of whether or not strikes continue.

The thinktank modelled four different scenarios and concluded that, based on current trends, NHS waiting list figures could peak by August 2024 if there was no more strike action by healthcare workers, before starting to come down. If strikes were to continue, the list could increase a further 180,000, it said.

Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said: “This analysis all but confirms that the prime minister’s pledge to reduce the size of the waiting list is increasingly unlikely to be met.”

He added: “As the Health Foundation report rightly says, the root cause of the delays to treatment that patients are now experiencing is a decade of underinvestment in the NHS.”

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Source: The Guardian, 27 October 2023