NHS England corrects waiting list data error

Today’s data also shows the total waiting list rose in August by 18,614 to 7.64 million, while the estimated number of patients waiting fell by 57,000 to 6.33 million.

This morning NHS England corrected a press release, a statistical notice and a dataset after Full Fact spotted an error in its waiting list data.

All of these originally said that the estimated number of patients waiting for non-emergency care in its referral to treatment (RTT) data fell by about 57,000 in August 2024, to 6.33 million.

In fact, this number rose by about 31,000 to 6.42 million.

NHS England issued a corrected press release and amended the notice and the dataset within an hour of us bringing the error to its attention. 

It also told us it had notified journalists who were expected to report the figures. The incorrect figure did appear this morning on the Guardian liveblog, which it has now corrected. 

We’ve asked NHS England what caused the problem, but it declined to comment.

The incorrect RTT dataset originally showed that 84.02% of the 7,643,214 cases waiting for treatment came to about 6,333,854 patients waiting (as some patients will be waiting for more than one thing). In fact the correct figure is about 6,421,554 patients.

However the error occurred, we’re grateful to NHS England for acting quickly to correct it.

We’ve written an article explaining what you need to know about NHS waiting lists, which we’ll update with the new data shortly.