'117,000 DIE ON WAITING LISTS FOR NHS'

DOUBLE THE NUMBER OF DEATHS THAN BEFORE PANDEMIC, SHOCK FIGURES REVEAL

- Ross Lydall

AN estimated 117,000 patients died last year waiting for care on the NHS, figures revealed today.

This included thousands on waiting lists at London NHS trusts including 2,512 at Barts Health, 1,078 at King's College hospitals and 894 at University College London hospitals.

Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said the death toll was directly linked to the record number of patients waiting for non-emergency NHS care - about 6.5 million. He told the Standard: "I think it underlines not just that we have got the highest record waiting lists in the history of the NHS but sadly this is also a matter of life and death. There are people who will die avoidably because the NHS couldn't get to them in time. There will also be, I suspect, in that huge backlog a whole load of undiagnosed conditions."

Backlogs built up during the Covid pandemic as hospitals treated thousands who were ill with the virus, forcing patients with other illnesses to wait much longer than usual for surgery or treatment. The figures emerged via freedom of information requests to every NHS trust in England by the Labour Party. A total of 34,896 deaths were revealed by 67 trusts. Labour said that extrapolating the number across all trusts would lead to a death toll of 116,667.

This is about double the number of annual waiting list deaths before the pandemic. Across the country, only 61.7 per cent of patients start their treatment within the target 18 weeks.

By April the most recent figures available from NHS England - the number waiting more than a year had risen to 323,093.

In London, Barts Health had 107,695 patients on its waiting list in April, Guy's and St Thomas' 91,421 and the Royal Free-where Mr Streeting had life-saving cancer surgery last year - 89,925.