The number of appointments for patients waiting for NHS treatments in England increased by nearly 19,000, to 7.42 million in March up from 7.4 million in February.
While the increase has not undone all recent progress, the path to reducing the waiting list has been slow and any gains are fragile, as today’s figures show.
The waiting list had been showing gradual but steady decreases since last September but has now increased for the first time since then.
Before COVID, the waiting list was at around 4.5 million appointments, and it peaked at 7.7 million in September 2023.
Since then, the waiting list has decreased by around 300,000 from its peak, but remains well above pre-pandemic levels.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS England’s National Medical Director, said that the scale of demand on frontline NHS teams is “enormous” as they deal with the challenges of the backlog, while also keeping up with hundreds of thousands of new patients that need care:
“In March, we saw a particularly sharp rise in referrals – yet staff still managed to deliver more for patients with 100,000 more treatments delivered…
“It is a good thing that more people are coming forward for care – and I would urge anyone who has health concerns to come forward and get checked out as soon as they can,” he said.
While it’s true that more appointments were delivered than in the same month last year, the 1.5 million taken off the waiting list is not a historically high figure and is in fact around 2,000 fewer than in the same month two years ago.
Similarly, the 1.8 million new appointments added to the waiting list, while larger than the 1.75 million new appointments a year ago, is fewer than the 1.9 million added in March 2023, and not exceptional compared to other recent comparable months.
Rising demand for services is a consistent trend and will continue to be a challenge for the NHS and Keir Starmer’s government, who have pledged to bring the waiting list down.
There are generally seasonal trends in the waiting list, which does typically tend to decrease over winter and increase into the spring and in to summer.
According to NHS England, the reason that the waiting list increases every spring is that more people come forward for treatment after the winter.
On average, it’s gone up in March by an average of 68,000 treatments, based on the last ten years of data excluding those during COVID – so this year’s increase of around 19,000 from February to March is below that average.
NHS England say that the extra activity the government has delivered this year could be the reason underlying this smaller increase.
It remains to be seen to whether the wait list will continue to increase into the summer as usual, and to what extent the overall impact of this seasonal rush will be mitigated.
Commenting on the figures, Health and Social Care Secretary, Wes Streeting said:
“Since day one, we have been clear it will take time to reverse the disastrous waiting list we inherited. But since July, real progress has been made – including over winter. We have overseen a massive increase in appointments available to meet rising demand, reduced long waits and helped people get diagnosed quicker.”
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