Another story to sour Andrew Lansley’s cornflakes this morning: the King’s Fund has released a “monitoring report” into the NHS which highlights, among other things, that hospital waiting times are at a 3-year high. The figures they have used are available on the Department of Health website — but unshackled from Excel files, and transcribed into graph form (see above, click for a larger version), they are now, it seems, a discussion point. The Today Programme tried to bait a couple of NHS chieftains on the matter earlier. The worst they could extract from either of them was that, “[waiting times] haven’t got massively longer now, but people are worried about the future.”
Although the coverage is centred firmly on how many patients are waiting longer than Labour’s 18-week target, it’s worth dwelling on a few other points in the King’s Fund report.
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