NHS Activity - Two Million extra Appointments

What do the data say?

The government press office was quick off the mark to let us know that ‘over two million extra NHS appointments delivered early as trusts handed £40 million to go further and faster.’

The Prime Minister welcomed the figures published by NHS England, which show that between July and November last year, the NHS delivered almost 2.2 million more elective care appointments than the previous year.

The Prime Minister's Office doesn’t think it's worth linking to the original data. So, instead of taking the figures as read— as the MSM does—TTE thought we’d take a peek.

We started with the Consultant-led Referral to Treatment Waiting Times Data. The referral to treatment waiting times peaked in December 2023 and are back to about average, with 4.4 million still waiting more than 18 weeks. The number dipped in December 2023 (4.3 million) and began increasing again in April 2024 (4.4 million).

About 95,000 more patients were waiting for treatment in December 2024 than in the same month in 2023. However, only about 43,000 more patients were waiting for treatment from July to December 2023 than in the same period in 2024.

From August 4, 2023, to July 2, 2024, 29 days were lost to strike action, including 14 days from December to February. By January 2024, NHS England reported that 1,333,221 acute inpatient and outpatient appointments had been rescheduled.

There has been some progress in reducing the number of people waiting more than 52 weeks, down to 200,000 from a high of just under 400,000. However, the fact that it reached this high and remains so high is still a disgrace, and someone should be held accountable for it.

We next took a look at the Monthly Hospital Activity. After consulting users of the Monthly Activity Return (MAR), a decision was made to retire the collection from its current format. Since June 2020, the monthly referrals return (MRR) has replaced MAR and the quarterly activity return (QAR).

We were sent here. However, another consultation published on 21 November 2024 announced the decision to discontinue this collection permanently.

So we headed to the Hospital. Outpatient Activity. This didn’t help us, as the publication date was September 26, 2024, and the data only covered the period up to 31 March 2024. We then looked for NHS England appointment data but only found data on appointments in General Practice.

Finally, we examined the Provisional Monthly Hospital Episode Statistics for Admitted Patient Care, Outpatient, and Accident and Emergency data and found what we were looking for.

Monthly Hospital Episode Data for Admitted Patient Care reports that from January 2024 to December 2024, there were 22.3 million finished consultant episodes, 58% (12.9 million) of which included at least one procedure or intervention, and 8.5 million were day cases. There were 142.9 million outpatient appointments made, with 110.8 million (77.5%) of these attended by the patient (8.1 million appointments were missed).

In 2024, there have been 1.26 million more finished consultant episodes compared with 2023, and as the data shows, more day cases and admissions.

Outpatient appointment attendance is currently just over 104 million, up from 95 million the previous year.

So, overall activity is up, yet the number waiting for treatment within 18 weeks remains relatively stable.

Examining NHS statistics is a minefield; despite the billions spent on NHS Data, they are not user-friendly. It's no wonder the MSM doesnt bother to take a peek. As for where the Prime Minister's 2 million comes from, it’s anyone's guess.

This post was written by two old geezers who like to take a peek.