Are 800,000 Scottish people waiting for NHS treatment?

During Sunday evening’s BBC Debate Night Scottish leaders debate, Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Alex Cole-Hamilton twice claimed 800,000 people are waiting for NHS treatment in Scotland.

In the same debate, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar also said there are “almost 800,000 people stuck on an NHS waiting list”.

This isn’t a reliable figure for the number of people on waiting lists in Scotland.

It refers to the number of waits for new outpatient appointments, inpatient appointments and appointments for eight key diagnostic tests. But this isn’t the same as the number of individuals waiting for treatment, as we’ve explained before.

Public Health Scotland (PHS) publishes figures for the number of individuals who are an NHS inpatient, day case and new outpatient waiting list. Its latest figures show 578,804 individuals were on at least one of these waiting lists as of 28 February 2026.

PHS doesn’t publish data on the number of individuals waiting for other types of appointment, so we don’t know exactly how many people are on these lists or the total number of individuals on all NHS waiting lists in Scotland.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats told us it calculated its figure by totalling the number of new outpatient, inpatient and day case waits as of 31 December 2025 (517,415 and 156,314 respectively) and the number of ongoing waits for eight key diagnostic tests. The figure they provided for the latter—146,005 is the number of waits for these tests as of 30 September 2025.

(More recent figures show there were 123,992 waits for the eight key diagnostic tests as of 31 December 2025).

Scottish Labour told us it was using the figure “as it represents the scale of key NHS waiting lists.” When we’ve seen it make a similar claim previously, it told us it was based on a similar calculation to that of the Scottish Lib Dems.

But PHS warns against adding the figures together this way. It says: “Individual patients are counted more than once if they are waiting to attend more than one scheduled hospital appointment or admission [...] To avoid overestimating the population affected, the number of ongoing waits for inpatients, day cases, new outpatients and any other service (e.g. diagnostics) should not be added together to determine the proportion of the total population waiting for these types of care.”

Previously, Scottish Labour told us it considered the PHS figure for individuals to be an underestimate, as it doesn’t include patients waiting for a range of other NHS treatments.

It’s also worth noting that not all of those who are on NHS waiting lists in Scotland will necessarily be out of work or not paying tax because they’re waiting for an appointment, as Mr Cole-Hamilton appeared to claim.

Around 267,020 people in Scotland were economically inactive due to being ‘long-term sick or disabled’ between October 2024 and September 2025 (although we don’t know how many of these people are waiting for NHS treatment).