Patients Facing Delays Stuck On Hidden NHS Waiting Lists

The BBC has reported that patients are facing delays whilst stuck on hidden waiting lists that do not show up in the official figures in England.

The current published  ‘official’ waiting list is at 7.6 million. However, the true scale of the backlog is thought to be much higher.

This is because patients needing ongoing care are not automatically included in those figures.

Whilst NHS England said that hospitals should be monitoring and counting such cases, BBC News has found evidence which suggests that this is not always the case.

Official waiting lists

The official wait list keeps track of patients who are waiting to begin treatment.

According to data for 2022/23, around 1.4 million treatments are recorded as beginning each month on average, with one in three affected by delays.

However, there are more than 3 million other appointments and treatments carried out for patients who are receiving ongoing care.

Whilst many of those will be receiving their care in a timely manner, the number of those patients whose treatment is delayed is not known because it seems that they are not being referred back onto the wait list as they should be when their treatment is delayed.

Hidden waiting lists

Hospitals are meant to return patients facing unnecessary delays back to the waiting list to ensure that they are counted for in the backlog figures.

The BBC reports that it asked 30 NHS Trusts how regularly returning patients back to the waiting list was happening, and worryingly, only 3 out of those 30 could provide figures.

Karen Hyde from Insource, a company that helps hospitals to manage waiting lists, said that the guidance regarding ongoing treatment and waiting lists was “commonly ignored”. She said:

She said that some patients face being taken off the waiting list before their treatment starts. This can be done when a patient is not ready for treatment or if they have refused it. But the issue is that many hospitals do not have a reliable system for tracking those patients, and this results in them simply becoming “lost and delayed”.

Patients lost in the system

The potential consequences of a failure to monitor those waiting for ongoing treatment could be catastrophic.

If patients become lost in the system because there is no way to track them once they are off the ‘official’ waiting list, it might result in avoidable delays to their treatment and/or monitoring of their condition.

Macmillan Cancer Support policy head, Minesh Patel, said that cancer patients receiving regular chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and those under surveillance to check if their cancer had returned, had faced delays.

The British Heart Foundation said that heart failure patients were also at particular risk as they must have regular check-ups to ensure their treatment was working. If those appointments are not happening, the risk of missing something is significant. They said:

Comment

The true extent of this problem is far from clear, but the BBC’s investigation suggests that it is significant.

Losing patients in the system who ought to be able to rely on their ongoing care could result in unnecessary and avoidable delays in treatment or reviews. This has a knock-on effect which could be catastrophic for patients if they are not seen in a timely manner.

It should be a priority to improve monitoring and overseeing of these patients whose care and treatment is just as important as someone who has not yet started their treatment.