Cases and patients confusion in the Times
An article about NHS England targets in the Times on Monday reported that hospital waiting lists “mean 7.6 million people are in line for treatment”.
As we’ve said many times before, this is not quite right. The 7.6 million figure refers to the number of cases on the waiting list, not the number of people.
In fact in the latest referral-to-treatment (RTT) data, which covers the end of September 2024, there were about 6.3 million people on the waiting list.
As NHS England explains in a note on its interactive report: “Each ‘case’ is an RTT pathway which relates to an individual referral for a patient. A patient can be on more than one RTT pathway at the same time if they are waiting for consultant-led elective treatment for different conditions or unrelated clinical reasons. Some patients will therefore be included in the figures above more than once.”
Our AI tools have spotted versions of this mistake more than 50 times in the past year.
NHS England’s RTT data doesn’t cover everyone waiting for any kind of NHS service, but it’s what people usually mean by “the waiting list”. Survey data collected by the Office for National Statistics last winter found that about 25% of adults in Great Britain were “currently waiting for a hospital appointment, test, or to start receiving medical treatment through the NHS”.
We approached the Times for comment.