The NHS waiting list has long posed a challenge to both individuals and businesses in the UK. Yet now there is some good news, with the government delivering the promised 2 million extra appointments in just the first six months of their term.
Crisis over?
This rather promising progress could be seen as a sign that the waiting list crisis is over. Unfortunately, the reality remains rather sobering.
At its peak (September 2023) the waiting list stood at 7.77 million outstanding appointments in NHS (England). The waiting list is indeed now much lower at 7.46 million, yet the progress is slow.
The overall drop of 310,000 cases is very welcome. Yet this represents just 20,000 more cases each month. At this rate it will take a decade to return the waiting list to the level experienced immediately prior to the pandemic (4.39 million).
Visualisation
Which is all remarkably interesting, yet not much use without context. So perhaps we should visualise the current NHS (England) waiting list in terms of population centres? For 7.46 million appointments is the equivalent of the entire (and the combined) populations of:
Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Coventry, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Luton, Manchester, Milton Keynes, Newcastle, Northampton, Norwich, Nottingham, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Reading, Sheffield, Southampton & Stoke-on-Trent all queuing for treatment.
This highlights the scale of the remaining challenge for both the government and the NHS.
A long road back
It’s clear that although progress is being made, the path to an acceptable national waiting list (which stood at just 2.32 million back in 2010) will take many years to achieve at the current rate.
As we discussed earlier this year, one of the challenges remains the continued bottleneck around social care in England. And until that problem is resolved the national waiting list will likely remain high. This also applies to waiting times, which currently stand at more than a quarter of a year (14.2 weeks).
UK employers should remember that the health of their workforce is ultimately underpinned by NHS services. It follows that employers should seek to deploy all their workforce wellbeing tools (including the targeted use of occupational health assessments) whenever and wherever possible. After all, prevention is nearly always better and more effective than cure.
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