In March 2023, a patient in an Accident and Emergency in England would spend approximately 70 minutes waiting before treatment would begin. After the wait times dropped due to COVID-19 effects, it reached a record high of 81 minutes in May 2021 and November 2021. The median wait time for treatment has been fluctuating since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Substantial waiting times experienced by patients

In the first quarter of 2021/2022 in England 83.4 percent of patients who attended A&E were admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. This is below the NHS’s target that 95 percent of attendees to A&E should be seen within four hours. Since 2011, the share of patients seen within four hours has been declining. In addition, since 2016 there has been a marked increase in examples of patients waiting for more than twelve hours at A&E to be admitted, with a recorded high of 7,161 individuals in 2020/21 third quarter.

Increased number of attendances

The reasons behind the increased waiting times and the missed treatment targets could be partially explained by the increased number of people attending A&E. There were over 6.1 million attendances to the A&E department in England in the first quarter of 2021/22. This figure has been increasing since 2012, which means there is a greater strain on emergency services across the country. The large drop in number of attendances is reflected in wait times and with number of attendances rebounding again, wait times have also increased.

The number of patients waiting twelve hours or more has dramatically increased in recent years. In 2022, around 347,707 patients waited twelve hours or more compared with 1,306 in 2015.

NHS waiting times Waiting times in the NHS have become increasingly high in recent years, especially starting the winter of 2022 with rates of hospitalization due to influenza surpassing those due to COVID-19. A national outbreak of Strep A infections put additional strain on the health service. Despite the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the median wait-times have far outpaced the peak reached in September 2020 of 48 minutes.

Staff shortages The NHS was the worlds 7th largest employer in 2022, employing more than 1.3 million individuals. Due to increasingly difficult working conditions and disputes over pay, the NHS is struggling to fill vacancies and had more than 110,000 in December 2021. Additionally, expenditure on staff as a share of total expenditure has fallen in recent years. A survey conducted in December 2021 found that more than 30 percent of NHS staff had thought about leaving the organization. 2022 and 2023 saw a record number of strikes across the UK in various sectors. Support for the strikes has generally been high, but none higher than support for NHS nurses who enjoyed 64 percent of public support as of November 2022.

Restoration of elective activity is one of the highest priorities for NHS England and NHS Improvement following the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Understanding the composition of the waiting list is critical to managing restoration within North West London.

Data will be collected via data submissions made by each individual provider of NHS Acute healthcare services in North West London. This dataset includes data from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust, London North West Healthcare NHS Trust and The Hillingdon Hospital NHS Trust. Data will be processed under an Information Sharing Agreement between North West London CCG and each organisation. Data submissions will be processed and used for the following purposes:

1. Developing a visual display of the waiting list composition (Elective Waiting List Data Dashboard).
2. Developing a data quality improvement programme with providers.

All RTT pathways with a clock start date after 23:59 on Sunday 4th April 2021 and before 23:59 on the Sunday of the reporting period and not recorded to date (in a previous submission).

The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) is responsible for the collection, collation and validation of inpatient, Day Case and Outpatient waiting lists.

The IPDC Waiting List Open Data report shows the total number of people waiting, across the various time Bands, for inpatient and Day treatment in each Specialty (these numbers do not include GI Endoscopies, see separate report).

The Children’s Health Act 2018 came into effect on 1st January 2019. Under this act, Children’s Health Ireland was established and all assets, liabilities and records were transferred from Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and National Childrens Hospital at Tallaght University Hospital to the new body. From 1st January 2019, all NTPF reports reflect this change and data from the three sites of Children’s Health Ireland are reported as one entity. On the 31st of July 2019 Children’s Health Ireland opened a new Paediatric Outpatient Department and Urgent Care Centre at CHI Connolly in Blanchardstown. The waiting lists for this site are incorporated into the Children’s Health Ireland figures.

Please note that NTPF does not collect activity data, i.e., numbers treated or removed. A Snapshot of the number of patients waiting in each hospital is collected and published, monthly, on the NTPF website.

Boards and management of individual public hospitals are responsible for the accuracy and the integrity of patient data submitted to NTPF.

The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) is responsible for the collection, collation and validation of Inpatient, Day Case and Outpatient waiting lists. The IPDC GI Endoscopy Waiting List Open Data report shows the total number of people waiting, across the various time bands, for GI Endoscopy treatment. The Children’s Health Act 2018 came into effect on 1st January 2019. Under this act, Children’s Health Ireland was established and all assets, liabilities and records were transferred from Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and National Childrens Hospital at Tallaght University Hospital to the new body. From 1st January 2019, all NTPF reports reflect this change and data from the three sites of Children’s Health Ireland are reported as one entity. On the 31st of July 2019 Children's Health Ireland opened a new Paediatric Outpatient Department and Urgent Care Centre at CHI Connolly in Blanchardstown. The waiting lists for this site are incorporated into the Children's Health Ireland figures. Please note that NTPF does not collect activity data, i.e., numbers treated or removed. A snapshot of the number of patients waiting in each hospital is collected and published, monthly, on the NTPF website. Boards and management of individual public hospitals are responsible for the accuracy and the integrity of patient data submitted to NTPF.

This table provides the current data on referral to treatment waiting times for patient pathways waiting (open pathway) to start treatment by grouped weeks. Hywel Dda health board has no patients waiting for audiological medicine from January 2019 onwards, this is due to the service moving into the community based model. In March 2016, we changed some of the terminology used in referral to treatment reporting. Previously, when publishing these statistics, we used the terminology ‘patients’. However, some users misinterpreted this as unique patients. It is possible that a person could be on a number of different lists waiting for different conditions – i.e. there would be one patient but more than one pathway. Due to the RTT dataset being an aggregate data collection we’re not able to measure the number of unique patients. Therefore, we are using the terminology ‘patient pathways’, to better reflect the fact that one person can be on multiple waiting lists. The methodology use to measure and calculate these statistics has not changed. This is also more consistent with the other nations of the UK in their reporting of RTT.

In 2023, less than half of Swedes considered the waiting time to be reasonable for hospital care. During 2020 and 2021, there was a higher share of respondents that believed the waiting time for hospitals was reasonable.

These data were collected as part of a four-year Wellcome Trust funded research project tracking the relation between waiting and care in general practice in a moment of overlapping crises for the NHS. A researcher at Birkbeck College set out to observe the forms that waiting could take across all areas of life and work in two Practices: one serving a densely populated urban area in Central East London, the other serving a large rural area in Devon. The transcripts comprise a series of recurring interviews with two general practitioners, and a collection of one-off interviews with other members of the general practice team including reception, managerial and administration workers. All the interviews were carried out between June 2020 and April 2021.

Waiting, Staying and Enduring in General Practice was a 4-year research study (2018 – 2022) based on observations and interviews carried out over the course of 1 year in two NHS general practices in England. Its original aim was to study the relationship between care and time during long periods of ‘watchful waiting’ in general practice. The emphasis on achieving clinical outcomes by adhering to tightly controlled timeframes when providing access, advice and treatments was at odds with the temporalities of much of the healthcare falling within its remit (intractable, complicated, long term and medically unexplained health conditions often with no clear ‘outcomes’). Responding to the discrepancy, this research investigated what forms of care could issue from time in general practice in situations in which nothing appeared to improve or get better. Based on interviews with healthcare workers in clinical and non-clinical roles, observations of routine GP appointments, observations of Balint group meetings and personal testimonies of general practitioners made publicly available online, it explored this understudied area of everyday healthcare through a series of ethnographically derived cases. The study formed part of ‘Waiting Times’, a wider interdisciplinary research project funded by the Wellcome Trust [205400]. This wider project – which ran from 2017 to 2023 and included the work of artists, psychoanalysts, historians and literary scholars – was a collaboration between Exeter University and Birkbeck, University of London, to investigate the temporalities of waiting in healthcare by taking a multi-stranded approach to understanding its significance as a cultural and psychosocial concept, and as an embodied and historical experience. Through this research, we sought to produce a critical theory of temporal endurance that could help to explain why experiences of suspension and waiting are so difficult to tolerate in the present time, and what are the potentialities of waiting as a form of care [https://waitingtimes.exeter.ac.uk/].

In November 2020, 87 percent of patients with suspected cancer in England were seen by a specialist within fourteen days of a referral by a GP, lower than the NHS operational standard that 93 percent of patients should be seen within this timeframe. Since January 2018, the NHS waiting time target for cancer referral has only been met six times.

From February 2021, data is only published for the suspected cancer pathway. Targets for the urgent and not via the urgent pathway have ceased and no new data will be collected or published for these pathways. The patients shown here are those newly diagnosed with cancer who started definitive treatment via the Urgent Suspected Cancer route. The national target for these patients is: at least 95 per cent of patients diagnosed with cancer, via the urgent suspected cancer route will start definitive treatment within 62 days of receipt of referral. Care should be taken when interpreting percentages, especially when dealing with small numbers.

IPDC GI Endoscopy Waiting List 2014 - Mar 2021. Published by The National Treatment Purchase Fund. Available under the license cc-by (CC-BY-4.0).The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) is responsible for the collection, collation and validation of Inpatient, Day Case and Outpatient waiting lists.

The IPDC GI Endoscopy Waiting List Open Data report shows the total number of people waiting, across the various time bands, for GI Endoscopy treatment.

The Children’s Health Act 2018 came into effect on 1st January 2019. Under this act, Children’s Health Ireland was established and all assets, liabilities and records were transferred from Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and National Childrens Hospital at Tallaght University Hospital to the new body. From 1st January 2019, all NTPF reports reflect this change and data from the three sites of Children’s Health Ireland are reported as one entity. On the 31st of July 2019 Children's Health Ireland opened a new Paediatric Outpatient Department and Urgent Care Centre at CHI Connolly in Blanchardstown. The waiting lists for this site are incorporated into the Children's Health Ireland figures.

Please note that NTPF does not collect activity data, i.e., numbers treated or removed. A snapshot of the number of patients waiting in each hospital is collected and published, monthly, on the NTPF website.

Boards and management of individual public hospitals are responsible for the accuracy and the integrity of patient data submitted to NTPF....

Analysis of ‘Inpatient/Day Case Waiting List 2014 - Mar 2021’ provided by Analyst-2 (analyst-2.ai), based on source dataset retrieved from http://data.europa.eu/88u/dataset/5fca9a76-9ab6-4d27-afe9-0a1cab9f7dd8 on 14 January 2022.

--- Dataset description provided by original source is as follows ---

The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) is responsible for the collection, collation and validation of Inpatient, Day Case and Outpatient waiting lists.

The IPDC Waiting List Open Data report shows the total number of people waiting, across the various time bands, for Inpatient and Day case treatment in each Specialty (these numbers do not include GI Endoscopies, see separate report).

The Children’s Health Act 2018 came into effect on 1st January 2019. Under this act, Children’s Health Ireland was established and all assets, liabilities and records were transferred from Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital Crumlin, Temple Street Children’s University Hospital and National Childrens Hospital at Tallaght University Hospital to the new body. From 1st January 2019, all NTPF reports reflect this change and data from the three sites of Children’s Health Ireland are reported as one entity. On the 31st of July 2019 Children's Health Ireland opened a new Paediatric Outpatient Department and Urgent Care Centre at CHI Connolly in Blanchardstown. The waiting lists for this site are incorporated into the Children's Health Ireland figures.

Please note that NTPF does not collect activity data, i.e., numbers treated or removed. A snapshot of the number of patients waiting in each hospital is collected and published, monthly, on the NTPF website.

Boards and management of individual public hospitals are responsible for the accuracy and the integrity of patient data submitted to NTPF.

--- Original source retains full ownership of the source dataset ---

ObjectiveThe coronavirus disease (COVID-19) disrupted healthcare systems and medical care worldwide. This study attempts to assess the performance of three Saudi hospitals during COVID-19 by comparing waiting times for outpatient appointments and the volume of elective surgeries before and after COVID-19.MethodsWe used ADA’A data collected from three Saudi hospitals for this retrospective cohort study. The outcome variables were “Waiting Time for Appointment” and “Elective OR Utilization”. The hospitals included in this study were: a 300-bed maternity and children’s hospital; a 643-bed general hospital; and a 1230-bed tertiary hospital. We included all patients who visited the OPD and OR in the time period from September 2019 to December 2021. A two-way ANOVA test was used to examine the differences in the outcome variables by hospital and by the phase of COVID-19.ResultsFor the elective OR utilization rate, the results showed that both the hospital and the phase of COVID-19 were significantly different (p-value < 0.05). On average, the elective OR utilization rate dipped considerably in the early phase of COVID-19 (33.2% vs 44.9%) and jumped sharply in the later phase (50.3%). The results showed that the waiting time for OPD appointment was significantly different across hospitals and before and after COVID-19 in each hospital (p-value < 0.05). the waiting time dropped during the early phase of COVID-19 for both the general hospital (GEN) (24.6 days vs 34.8 days) and the tertiary hospital (MDC) (40.3 days vs 48.6 days), while the maternity and children’s hospital (MCH)’s score deteriorated sharply (24.6 days vs 9.5 days).ConclusionThis study indicates that COVID-19 led to a significant impact on elective surgery rates and waiting time for OPD appointments in the early stage of the pandemic when the lockdown strategy was implemented in the country. Although the elective surgery rate had decreased at the designated COVID-hospital, the waiting time for OPD appointment had improved. This is a clear indication that the careful planning and management of resources for essential services during pandemic was effective.

From February 2021, data is only published for the suspected cancer pathway. Targets for the urgent and not via the urgent pathway have ceased and no new data will be collected or published for these pathways. The patients shown here are those treated via the non urgent route. The national target for these patients is: at least 98 per cent of patients newly diagnosed with cancer, not via the urgent route will start definitive treatment within 31 days of diagnosis (regardless of the referral route). Care should be taken when interpreting percentages, especially when dealing with small numbers.

The number of patients waiting for a hospital bed on trolleys was over 9.7 thousand in the month of August 2023, the worst year in the provided time interval. Hospital overcrowding otherwise known as the 'trolley crisis' has been a problem before the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of patients waiting for hospital bed on trolley dropped to approximately 3.1 thousand in 2020. Since the summer of 2021, when restrictions have generally been lifted, overcrowding of hospitals has again been emerging. This statistic displays the number of individuals waiting on hospital trolleys in Ireland in the month of August 2006 to August 2023.

As of 27/09/2022, this dataset has been superseded by a new version found here This data provides a quarterly update on waiting times for people accessing specialist drug and alcohol treatment services. In 2011, the Scottish Government set a standard that 90% of people referred for help with problematic drug or alcohol use will wait no longer than three weeks for specialist treatment that supports their recovery. This data was extracted from the new Drug and Alcohol Information System (DAISy) and its predecessor the Drug and Alcohol Treatment Waiting Times (DATWT) database. DAISy was implemented in four NHS Boards (Ayrshire & Arran, Dumfries & Galloway, Grampian and Western Isles) from December 2020, and was available in all NHS Boards from April 2021. All publications and supporting material to this topic area can be found on Public Health Scotland Substance Use page. The date of the next release can be found on our list of forthcoming publications.

The healthcare spending growth rate in the United Kingdom (UK) has experienced fluctuations since 1998. Then, the healthcare spending growth rate was 5.7 percent and by 2021 the healthcare spending growth was highest at 9.7 percent. 2003 saw the second highest healthcare spending growth rate at 8.6 percent, while in 2013, the growth rate was only one percent, a significant decrease from the preceding years.

Health expenditure in the UK compared to Europe

In 2019, the UK spent just 10.3 percent of its GDP on healthcare. In comparison to other European countries, this ranked the UK seventh in terms of health expenditure in 2019. Top of the list was Switzerland, which spent 12.1 percent of its’ GDP on healthcare in this year.

Consequences from low spending growth?

The majority of surveyed individuals in the UK, regard the NHS as a world class health service and remain happy with the high level of care provided by the organization. Although waiting times have been getting worse in the A&E department over the years. The NHS has been falling behind the target that 95 percent of patients should be seen within four hours of arrival. As a result, the primary reasons for dissatisfaction with the NHS among the public are the length of time required to get a GP or hospital appointment and the lack of staff.

In 2023, the annual spending on public healthcare in the United Kingdom (UK) accounted for 8.9 percent of GDP. This is a significant decrease from 10.1 percent in 2020 and 2021, which were the highest shares in the reported time period. Total spending on health in the UK In total, approximately 282 billion British pounds were spent on healthcare in the UK in 2022. Although, spending as a share of GDP decreased from 2009 to 2019, the total spending on health has continued to increase. Broken down by function, the UK government spent almost 139 billion pounds on curative/rehabilitative care. Performance of the NHS in the UK Individuals in the UK still regard the NHS as a world class health service and remain happy with the high level of care provided by the organization. However, waiting times have been getting worse in the A&E department over the years. The NHS has been falling behind the target that 95 percent of patients should be seen within four hours of arrival. As a result, the primary reasons for dissatisfaction with the NHS among the public are the length of time required to get a GP or hospital appointment and the lack of staff.