UK PM says NHS strikes have made cutting hospital waiting lists difficult

Rishi Sunak has blamed industrial action by NHS workers as to why the government has struggled to cut hospital waiting lists in England.

The prime minister insisted that progress had been made in relation to cutting lists for the “longest waiters”, but said “it’s hard to get the backlogs down when people are on strike”.

His comments come after it was announced that waiting times for routine hospital treatment in England had fallen slightly, according to the latest figures.

An estimated 7.71 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of October, relating to 6.44 million people – down from a record 7.77 million treatments and 6.50 million people at the end of September, NHS England said.

The number of people waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine treatment also fell – down from 391,122 to 377,618.

But the list of people waiting more than 18 months to start routine treatment did rise – from 10,201 at the end of September to 10,506 a month later.

Mr Sunak has pledged to eliminate all waits of more than a year by March 2025.

Speaking to broadcasters, the PM praised the government for “making good progress tackling the backlog”, but said strikes from NHS workers had made the challenge “difficult”.

“It’s hard to get the backlogs down when people are on strike – I think what we will see is that actually over the last few weeks that we haven’t had industrial action, people are starting to see progress in bringing down the waiting list and that shows people the improvement, the investments we’ve made – more doctors, more nurses, more beds, more surgical capacity, more diagnostic capacity,” he said.

“All of that can work to bring waiting lists down, but we do need people to be at work so I urge the junior doctors to consider the offer the government has put forward – everyone else has settled and it’s really on them to do the right thing.”

Other key figures that were released by NHS England included:

• The number of people being seen within four hours in A&Es last month fell from 70.2% to 69.7%.
• But the government did marginally cut the list of people waiting more than 12 hours in A&E departments from a decision to admit to actually being admitted – down from 44,655 to 42,854.
• Urgent cancer referrals made by GPs grew by 5% between September and October, while year-on-year the figure rose by 8%.
• Some 71.1% of patients urgently referred for suspected cancer in October were diagnosed or had cancer ruled out within 28 days – up from 69.7% the previous month.
• Around one in three patients arriving by ambulance at hospitals in England last week waited more than 30 minutes to be handed over to A&E. The figure is up from 25% for the week ending November 26.

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