How many people in Scotland are on NHS waiting lists?

19 June 2024

A claim we’ve heard repeated by Scottish politicians over the election campaign is that one in six or seven Scots are on NHS waiting lists. 

These figures are based on statistics published by Public Health Scotland (PHS), that track the number of ongoing waits for outpatient appointments, for inpatient or day case admissions, and for eight key diagnostic tests. It’s reached by combining the number of waits on each of these three lists, then dividing that by Scotland’s estimated population. 

But this misrepresents the data. PHS says this calculation shouldn’t be done as some patients are counted more than once on these lists if they’re waiting for multiple things. The total cases on these lists is 840,000 but this doesn’t reflect the number of people waiting. 

We don’t know exactly how many individuals, or what proportion of Scotland’s population, is on an NHS waiting list because PHS doesn’t provide this data.

You can read more about this here. 

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