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....<<<Read More>>>....
