The government recently announced that after only 5 months in power, it has met its promise of 2 million extra appointments in its first year. What does this mean for the related pledge, to achieve 18 week waits by 2029? A 🧵
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Jul-Nov 2023 included several strike days so in that period the NHS would be down several hundred thousand appointments on its usual levels. That'd inflate the extra appointments estimate. But the govt stopped the strikes so seems legit to count this.
(extract from NHS E Board minutes Oct 2023)
What does this mean for waiting list treatments? Here’s the equivalent table. The increase is 193,000 – a 2.6% increase rather than the 7.6% increase in appointments. (Puzzlingly this number is less than the 261,000 extra elective operations in the NHS E appointments data)
So, there have been 2.2m extra appointments and an extra 0.2m treatments from the waiting list. Appointments will always outnumber treatments because a completed treatment from the waiting list can involve a number of different tests, o/p appointments & operations. But by this much?
We’ve previously estimated the appointment to treatment ratio as 3 to 5 – in line with Jul-Nov data. The 2.2m *extra* appointments outnumber the extra waiting list treatments by 11 to 1. Fewer than of the extra appointments are completing treatment pathways than average.
So it seems like the extra appointments haven’t resulted in as many extra treatments as we’d expect. But, on the plus side, 2m was hit after 5 months. So there’s plenty of time for even more extra appointments if money allows.
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https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/recovery-of-elective_activity-mi/
(extract from NHS E Board minutes Oct 2023)