Guardian chart confuses patients and cases waiting for treatment

Rishi Sunak’s admission that the government has failed on a pledge to cut NHS waiting lists in England is widely covered this morning—and a common error cropped up again in a chart in the Guardian’s write-up, which has since been corrected.

The chart’s headline said it showed that “more than 7.6m NHS patients in England were awaiting treatment in November”.

In fact, as you can see from a chart of our own in a recent fact check, about 6.4 million patients were estimated to be waiting for non-emergency treatment with NHS England at the end of November.

But between them, these people were awaiting treatment in about 7.6 million cases. There are more cases than patients on the waiting list, because some people are waiting to be treated for more than one thing. 

It’s been common to talk about patients instead of cases for a long time, but it was hard to say how misleading this was until NHS England began publishing an estimate for the number of patients last year.

Now that we have a correct number, we think it’s important that people in politics and the media should use it, so we’ve checked several claims like this recently.

After we contacted the Guardian about the error, the chart’s headline was corrected to say “more than 7.6m NHS cases in England were awaiting treatment in November”.