NHS England corrects working days error in hospital appointments calculation
NHS England has corrected a mistake in its calculation of the number of extra hospital appointments delivered so far by the Labour government, after Full Fact challenged the error.
NHS England initially claimed the new data, which is an official statistic, showed a 3.3 million rise in the appointments counted towards the government’s manifesto commitment, when it was first published this morning. The figure was used in a (since-corrected) NHS England press release, and cited in a comment by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, that was quoted in the media.
But this figure comes from data that has been standardised to take account of the different number of working days in the periods being compared. And NHS England’s calculation mistakenly assumed there were 20 working days in February 2024. In fact, 2024 was a leap year, and there were no public holidays that February, so the month had an extra day, which fell during the week, making 21 working days.
As a result, the correct figure for the increase in appointments seen between July 2024 and February 2025, compared to the same period the previous year, is about 3.6 million. NHS England republished the data to include this figure after we told it about the problem, and released a correction to its statement about an hour after we got in touch.
The new statement said: “There was a calculation error in the file covering the number of additional appointments delivered since July. This has been updated from 3.3 million to 3.6 million.”
However at the time of writing the incorrect figure continues to appear in some news reports.
Before the 2024 general election, Labour promised to deliver an extra two million hospital appointments each year, although the party wasn’t clear exactly what this meant.
Then in February, NHS England began to publish data on the specific types of appointments being counted towards the pledge. At the same time, the government announced that it had been achieved. We have been monitoring this pledge on our Government Tracker.
Last October, NHS England quickly corrected a mistake in its waiting lists data, after we got in touch.