There were no 40 hour waits for ambulances prior to May 2010, and no 24 hour waits in A&E: very few patients exceeded the 4 Hour A&E wait target, until George Osborne’s austerity regime halted the decade of investment in the NHS – and ushered in a decade of decline.
Latest figures show nearly 40% of A&E patients who need admitting face a trolley wait of four hours or more waiting for a bed to be found. Around 10% are waiting over 12 hours. To put that in context, in England there had been more 12-hour trolley waits in January-November 2022 than in the past 10 years combined. Similar pressures are being reported in other parts of the UK.
It was not strike action or Covid that almost doubled England’s waiting list from 2.5m in 2010 to 4.6m at the end of 2019; nor have strikes been the cause of the subsequent rise to 7.2 million. It was not industrial action, but systematic government under-funding and lack of NHS capacity that meant 2.91 million patients had been waiting over 18 weeks for treatment in October, 410,983 of them waiting over a year.
Read the full article here:
https://lowdownnhs.info/analysis/the-state-of-the-nhs-before-the-strikes