Nuffield Trust: Are ‘crack teams’ reducing NHS waiting lists? (15 April 2025)

Summary

In September, at the Labour party conference, Wes Streeting said that the government would deploy ‘crack teams of top clinicians’ to hospitals in England to roll out reforms aimed at treating more patients and reducing elective waiting lists. The first 20 hospitals targeted by these teams would be in areas with the highest numbers of people off work sick.

Clinical teams in these 20 hospitals were given support to tackle waiting lists – focusing on high-flow theatre lists, reducing missed appointments and one-stop clinics. The scheme extended an existing programme, ‘Further Faster’, set up under the previous government. The 20 hospitals targeted are referred to as ‘Further Faster 20’ or ‘FF20’ trusts.

On 16 March, the government announced that waiting lists in FF20 trusts had, on average, fallen 130% faster than the fall elsewhere. Following this success, they said similar ‘crack teams’ would be rolled out to additional providers to boost NHS productivity and further cut waiting times. Gaining a deeper understanding as to what might be behind these differences is vital ahead of any wider rollout.

The Nuffield Trust has used publicly available data to look at this claim in more detail and examine what is driving differences between reductions in waiting lists in these 20 hospitals and elsewhere.