Labour Paying Hospitals £3 Million a Month to Delete Patients from Waiting Lists
Labour is paying hospitals £3 million a month to delete patients from waiting lists – making it look like the NHS is treating more people than it is. The Mail has the story.
Sir Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting have repeatedly boasted about Labour’s success in cutting the number of patients waiting for treatment since they came to power.
But new analysis of NHS figures suggests hundreds of thousands are being deleted from lists without receiving the treatment they were waiting for in a process known as ‘list cleansing’ or ‘validation’.
It involves paying consultants to trawl their backlog to look for patients who may have died or no longer need or want the procedure they were waiting for.
NHS England paid hospital trusts a total of £18,818,566 for validation exercises between April and September last year.
The organisation said trusts were paid about £33 for each patient removed from the list, suggesting more than half a million were deleted through the validation process in six months alone.
A source in the last government told the Times that Rishi Sunak had vetoed a plan by the NHS to conduct a similar exercise when he was prime minister because it involved paying the organisation for “doing something it should be doing anyway”.
They added that “artificially” reducing the waiting list gave a misleading impression of the NHS’s performance.
Experts also warned of the risk of patients being taken off lists when they still needed care.
Two weeks ago the Prime Minister claimed figures showed that NHS waiting lists were down by “more than 86,000”, which was the “largest fall in a month for over two years”.
“These aren’t just numbers – it is thousands of people getting the care they need,” he said.
However, this drop was only achieved by removing thousands of patients from the waiting list through the ‘validation’ process.
In November – the month that Starmer was referring to – 346,300 were removed from NHS waiting lists. This was 82,000 more than the month before and almost the entire claimed drop.
However, NHS data also show hospitals carried out about 10% fewer operations and appointments in November than they did in October, suggesting fewer people were being treated.
Worth reading in full.
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I received correspondence from the NHS asking if I wished to remain on the waiting list, no response within 24 hours would result in removal.
Maybe targeting people well enough to travel away from home is a good way of improving the statistics?
A friend told me his mother had had a letter from the NHS just before Christmas, saying that her appointment with Specsavers to replace her hearing aids, had been cancelled. Apparently, all Specsaver hearing appointments, at least in this area, had been cancelled. Patients were advised to contact Specsavers in April for a new appointment.
Does the money paid out for reducing waiting lists, include bonuses paid to NHS pen pushers for hitting performance targets, for reducing waiting lists?
Why do you oeople put up with this?
What exactly does “Labour” mean? Presumably whoever is paying for waiting lists to be “validated” it will be the taxpayer. What the PM says about it is spam.
They should already have systems in place to weed out dead people on waiting lists as well as other reasons. It’s a nice little earner having inflated lists, they then get money thrown at them to clear non existent backlogs.
There should be a glut of doctors in the not too distant future as AI system diagnose problems, it’s just a matter of how it all pans out.
My mother in law received an advice to book an appointment with a hospital recently as she had moved up the list. However, she last saw the doctor eighteen months ago, who discharged her with no further treatment necessary due to her age. We did not even know she was on a waiting list and, obviously, cancelled the appointment, so presumably she is one of those statistics. This is similar to GP surgeries. Again, we received a text message for an appointment scheduled five minutes after we got the message. We rang the surgery who said, oh no, that’s not an appointment for you to attend, it’s an internal review meeting about you! So, all these extra GP appointments are fake as well. But, hey, socialist governments have always been about fake statistics to prove how well they are doing.
I have heard that, aside from this, hospitals remove patients from the official waiting list and put them on their own internal waiting lists.
That’s the waiting list to get on a waiting list trick. Been around since the B.Liar government was a thing.
Similar to the ‘all calls are answered within six seconds’ trick used by DVLA, when what they mean is the call is automatically routed to a queueing system, where you might wait for the rest of your life, as far as they care…
Show me the incentive and I will show you the result.
POSIWID = the Purpose Of A System Is What It Does. Explained by: there’s no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. Can anyone claim that the NHS actually does what it is supposed to do, and is “fit for purpose”? Haven’t all the political Parties been telling us for decades the NHS is not delivering, and promising “vote for us and we’ll fix it” – but never do? The NHS consistently fails to do what it is supposed to do, provide a low cost and efficient health service to all irrespective of means than would be provided by a private and voluntary system. It’s worth noting that many hospitals, particularly those with saints names were set up by religious orders dating back centuries provided care for people unable to pay – St Bart’s was set up in 1153, others “free” hospitals were established by voluntary secular organisations and funded by benefactors, endowments, subscriptions, donations from wealthier people – eg London Free Hospital 1828 (now the Royal Free Hospital. Others include: Guy’s Hospital (London) — Founded in 1721 by Thomas Guy, a wealthy printer and bookseller (and former governor of… Read more »
Thank you for posting this – fascinating.
But, it’s still the envy of the world… right?
Isn’t “assisted dying” supposed to delete patients from waiting lists? Isn’t that the Communist Party of Great Britain’s plan?
Estimates differ but in 2022, CCPGB said around 121 000 patients died on the waiting list… Deleted.
Then & Now:-
Then pre-NHS: 2 750 hospitals; 480 000 beds; 400 000 on waiting list – 0.75% of population < 50 million.)
Now with our glorious NHS: 1 600 hospitals; 145 000 beds; 7 million on waiting list – 10%+ of population ~ 68 million.
That’s what you get for £242 billion; so that’s £3 500 per capita per year, and £6 188 per income tax payer. So married couple both working are paying ~ £12 200 pa or ~ £1 000 per month for Our™️ NHS.
Hands up anyone who thinks a private health insurance policy would cost that much. And hands up who think it’s “free”.
Up until 1911 National Insurance Act, which the people didn’t want, 75% of the population had private health insurance, non-insured covered by the voluntary sector, and Britain had a de facto national health service, just not run by the State.
Bang those pans!
So Starmer says “thousands of people getting the care they need” when he knows names are being removed from the list with no treatment.
Another lie. How many is that now?
Well I’ve certainly run out of fingers and toes. Even if I used those of three children and a husband there still wouldn’t be enough……
Every time he opens his mouth of course. It’s constant.
I am waiting for a minor operation on a leg, and have been for about 9 months.
I regularly receive a text which asks me to confirm that I still want the procedure, in the last month this has happened twice, one week apart.
It’s getting tiresome.
My wife and I frequently receive such missives that don’t even say what treatment they refer to, of course we reply in the affirmative.
This is all make work, and could usefully be replaced with actually doing something useful.
Too many administrators and not enough engineers (doctors in this case).
Family member received a link (valid for 7 days) after she had requested an appointment. Link led to a questionnaire with just the one question: Do you still require the appointment? I thought it odd at the time but this explains it.
Grifters!
If team Starmer applied their efforts used to lie and manipulate data to real problem solving, things might actually start to change instead of another example of spin ‘successes’
I am interested in how many people on the waiting list have opted to go private.
With all the money you people pay in taxes, this is outrageous. Why do you put up with it?