NHS England chair mixes up people and cases on the waiting list

12 June 2025

The chair of NHS England, Dr Penny Dash, said at the NHS ConfedExpo Conference yesterday (22:45): “There are seven and a half million people on the waiting list.” This was found with the help of our AI tools.

As we’ve often said before, this isn’t quite right. In the data when Dr Dash was speaking, there were 6.2 million people on the Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting list—and they were involved in about 7.4 million cases.

There are always more cases than people on the list, because some people are awaiting treatment for more than one thing.

NHS England began to report an estimate for the number of unique patients on the RTT list in November 2023. NHS England referred to the data correctly in its press notice this morning.

For more analysis of NHS waiting lists, read our explainer.

Full Fact approached NHS England for comment.

Related topics

Health

Full Fact fights bad information

Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.

Subscribe to weekly email newsletters from Full Fact for updates on politics, immigration, health and more. Our fact checks are free to read but not to produce, so you will also get occasional emails about fundraising and other ways you can help. You can unsubscribe at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy.