NHS waiting lists at record levels – how busy are hospitals in your area? | UK news

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Record number of patients awaiting start of routine hospital treatment, latest figures from NHS England show – and Sky News analyzes suggest the backlog of patients is much worse in some areas than in others.

Birmingham and Solihull lead the way, which – as a proportion of their population – have a backlog of more than two and a half times as much backlog as the York Valley.

In the Birmingham and Solihull Medical Commissioning Group (CCG), 14,200 patients per 100,000 were waiting to start treatment, compared with 5,287 patients per 100,000 in the Vale of York CCG.

You can compare these low pressure areas to yours using the table below:

In Birmingham, elective operations at Queen Elizabeth Hospital were called off on some days in July due to a lack of space in intensive care, in part due to COVID-19.

Although less than a fifth of the peak earlier this year, there were more than 275 patients from COVID-19 across two large hospital trusts in Birmingham as of August 12.

Other CCG areas with the highest proportion of people awaiting treatment, such as Bury, Salford and Manchester, have seen the largest number of COVID-19 patients in recent months.

It was previously revealed that 5.5 million people are waiting to start treatment at the end of June across England.

Of these, 3.8 million patients were awaiting treatment within 18 weeks – an increase of 174,248 patients from the previous month.

There are signs of progress in reducing the accumulation of patients who wait the longest.

The number of people waiting more than a year to start treatment has fallen by about a third since it peaked at more than 430,000 people in March.

At the end of June, there were 304,803 people waiting for more than 52 weeks – down 31,930 from the previous month.

Professor Stephen Boyce, national medical director for NHS England, said the health service was caring for “the largest number of patients ever” over the summer “to tackle the backlog of COVID”.

NHS England also released statistics showing that A&E attendance in July rose 36.2% to 2,162,799 compared to the same month last year.

The number of emergency admissions was up 12.6% in July 2020, but down 3.9% from July 2019.

It appears that the increase in the number of patients requiring care outweighs the decrease in the accumulation, and this may be the reason for the increase in waiting lists in general.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent think-tank, has suggested that this trend is likely to continue. It recently estimated that the waiting list in England could rise to 14 million by the fall of next year.

The Data and Forensics team is a multi-skilled unit dedicated to providing transparent Sky News journalism. We collect, analyze, and visualize data to tell data-driven stories. We combine traditional reporting skills with advanced analysis of satellite imagery, social media and other open source information. By telling stories in multimedia, we aim to better explain the world while showing how our journalism works.

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