22 November 2021
Secretary of State for Health says continued increase in NHS waiting lists inevitable – Medmin looks at how long they could get
In a surprisingly candid comment on yesterday’s The Andrew Marr Show on BBC1, Health Secretary for England Sajid Javid confirmed that the pressures on the NHS mean that the waiting list will continue to grow. He said “I’ve been really honest and open about this. It is going to go higher, because this is unprecedented demand”.
Any increase will be on top the 5.8 million people recorded waiting at the end of September, which is the highest figure since August 2007.
This led us at Medmin to look at how bad things might get. We used a waiting list modelling tool developed by the highly respected and independent Institute for Fiscal Studies to model the impact of changes in patient demand and hospital capacity on waiting times.
The startling headlines are that even conservative modelling shows numbers waiting increasing to over 12 million by the end of next year and continuing to increase to over 17 million by 2025.
The assumptions we used are that only three quarters of those patients who weren’t referred during 2020 actually end up being placed on a waiting list and that it will take two years to work through that backlog of out-patient referrals.
The main constraint on NHS capacity is the ongoing impact of Covid and difficulty attracting staff. Currently over 8,000 of the 101,000 acute hospital beds in England are occupied by people with Covid. So we’ve assumed NHS capacity in the current year will only be 92% of pre-pandemic levels.
Even if over the next few years the success of the vaccine programme means that Covid patients cease to be a problem to hospitals, the challenges in increasing numbers of doctors and nurses could result in capacity never being restored to pre-pandemic levels. We’ve assumed that that capacity gets to 95% of its 2019 level and that demand to be treated from patients doesn’t increase from the level it was at before the pandemic.
None of these assumptions are overly pessimistic and some could be said to err on the side of optimism. It is easy from this modelling to see why Sajid Javid was being warned by officials over the summer that the number of people waiting for treatment in England could exceed 13 million.
The IFS waiting list model populated with Medmin assumptions
