More Full Fact wins: corrections after waiting list confusion

At Full Fact, we want our fact checking to have real-world impact, to reduce the risk of inaccurate information spreading. So we’re grateful to the shadow Treasury minister, Tulip Siddiq, whose office told us it will ask Parliament to correct the record after she said 7.8 million people were on NHS waiting lists. 

As we said in our fact check, it’s actually around 6.5 million people, who between them are waiting for 7.8 million courses of treatment with the NHS in England, which the UK government controls. (More are waiting for treatment in the other UK nations, but the different lists are difficult to combine.)

Another Labour MP, Rachael Maskell, told us she would talk about episodes of care, instead of people, in future. And the Times and Independent both corrected articles after we got in touch. 

In connection with our latest article, we also made contact with Andrew Western, Angela Eagle and Sarah Olney—all MPs who made similar mistakes—as well as the Guardian, the i, and the Royal College of Surgeons, who did too.

Confusion on this issue has been very widespread since NHS England began publishing data on the number of unique patients on the waiting list at the beginning of the month. We’d already written about the subject three times before our latest article.

It used to be common to call the number of cases on the waiting list the number of “people”, but now we do have an actual figure for this, we think it’s important to use the correct one. Both figures are at record highs.