NHS waiting times and satisfaction aren’t comparable throughout history

Health secretary Wes Streeting claimed three times in parliament this week that previous Labour governments have overseen the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in the health service’s history.

As we’ve reported before, there’s not comparable data going back long enough to be sure that either of these claims are true.

Addressing the House of Commons on 9 September, Mr Streeting said he could “call on any number of Labour health secretaries who helped deliver the shortest waiting times and the highest patient satisfaction in history”. He repeated that comment twice more. These comments were then also reported on by PA and detected by Full Fact’s AI tools.

We’ve fact checked these claims from prominent Labour politicians a number of times before.

As we said previously, it’s not clear what a claim about the ‘shortest waiting times in history’ would be based on. Waiting times don’t appear to have been recorded nationally until 1987, and have been measured in different ways since. If Mr Streeting meant to refer to the size of the waiting list then these have also been measured in several different ways since the NHS was founded, and experts at the Nuffield Trust have told us that they’re not aware of any data that would allow a direct comparison of this sort.

Likewise, we’ve been unable to find a consistent measure of patient satisfaction across the NHS’s history.

Public satisfaction with the NHS began to be measured consistently in 1983, and reached its highest point in 2010, just after the end of the last Labour government. (Although it’s unlikely the Conservative-led coalition that followed had significantly influenced the NHS by then.)

We’ve contacted Mr Streeting’s office and will update this blog with any response.