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Labour has pledged to clear the 18-week NHS waiting list within five years should they win the General Election by establishing weekend and evening clinics and delivering 40,000 more appointments a week.
It says it also plans to clear the backlog by doubling the number of scanners to diagnose patients earlier and delivering the biggest expansion of NHS staff in history.
Other elements of the plan include hospitals in the same area sharing staff and introducing joint waiting lists and using spare capacity in the private sector, free of charge to patients. It also refers to as yet unspecified reforms “to get more out of the service for what we put in”.
Labour said staff at Guy’s and St Thomas’s NHS Foundation Trust have already proven they were able to get their high intensity theatre lists on weekends up and running within six weeks.
Keir Starmer, Leader of the Labour Party, said: “It was NHS staff working in the hospital I can see from my office in Parliament who led the way on this new model. Labour will take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS, so patients in every part of the country can be treated on time. The NHS is personal to me. It runs through my family. That’s why I’m utterly committed to reforming this service, getting the NHS back on its feet, and making it fit for the future.”
Need to support the workforce more to clear the waiting list
Health leaders said that the welcomed the promises set out but every penny counts in the service and to make inroads in tackling the waiting list they need long term planning which means the right support and resources to ensure the extra beds opened this winter continue to be staffed, as well as opening new theatres to keep tackling the backlog.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation said: “We cannot escape the surrounding pressures that the service is under, this includes rising demand, ongoing industrial action, and a financial crisis in social care. While the priority for staff as always is to treat patients and keep them safe, the backlog still looms over the NHS with the IFS reporting that it’s unlikely waiting lists will reach pre-pandemic levels over the next four years.
“Any new government faces an NHS in an incredibly tight financial position, and leaders are extremely worried that this could jeopardise the improvements made so far. That is why our members would also like to see capital funding boosted by an extra £6.4 billion a year. This will mean they can start to address the repairs backlog and invest in new technology and equipment, which directly effects productivity in the service. NHS leaders also want to see a promise to fund the existing NHS workforce plan, so we have enough staff to treat patients.”
The British Medical Association added that it was a laudable aspiration for Labour to commit to bringing waiting times down, but they will need to do more to support the workforce to make this a reality.
It said that elephant in the room remains pay for the expertise of doctors needed to clear these waiting lists. Just as Labour state they cleared waiting lists before, this was a time when doctors were properly valued for the work they did. Without restoring this pay – and most urgently resolving the dispute with junior doctors – doctors will continue to leave and any promises to solve the backlog will fall at the first hurdle.
Professor Philip Banfield, BMA council chair, added that the plans also do not address senior doctors being prevented from taking on extra NHS shifts due to persistently punitive and complex pension taxation rules.
“It will take more than a few new scanners to deliver this promise, and much more engagement with, and recognition of, staff who are leaving the NHS due to poor pay, conditions and exhaustion. ‘Spare capacity’ – either in the private sector or at evenings and weekends – relies on the same doctors already working in our NHS 24/7. Expecting them to spread themselves even more thinly won’t cut it now that goodwill has been so roundly eroded over the last few years,” he said.
150,000 patients died while on NHS waiting list last year
Labour also published new data which shows that approximately 148,000 people died in 2023 before receiving the treatment they were waiting for. This has doubled since 2017/18, when the figure stood at around 60,000. The figures are also higher than in 2021, when the country was still in the midst of the Covid pandemic.
The results came from a freedom of information request by the Labour Party to every NHS trust in England which received 80 responses out of 169 acute and community trusts.
It found that at Mid and South Essex Trust, more than 9,200 patients passed away last year, 8,400 of whom had been waiting for more than 18 weeks. Over 4,000 patients at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust and almost 4,000 patients at the Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals Trust passed away last year.
The NHS constitution states that patients should not wait more than 18 weeks for treatment, but almost half of patients today wait longer than that to receive healthcare. The FOI revealed that 62,000 people died last year after waiting for more than 18 weeks for NHS care.