Plan to hit 18-week NHS wait target ‘set to fail’

The government’s plan to tackle the hospital backlog in England will fail without a fundamental reform in how services work, health leaders say.

Labour aims to increase the number of appointments and operations done each week by 40,000, to help hit the 18-week waiting time target.

But NHS Confederation research found that would only deliver about 15% of the extra capacity needed to get back to reaching the target, which has not been hit since 2006.

It called for a wider transformation of hospital care, including greater use of digital technologies to improve productivity.

The warning comes ahead of the release of a government review of NHS performance later this week.

Led by NHS surgeon and independent peer Lord Ara Darzi, the review was ordered by Health Secretary Wes Streeting shortly after the election, to help identify the biggest barriers to improving waiting times.

Sources close to the review said it would be a warts-and-all report, including criticism about the lack of productivity in some areas.

There will also be a warning about the state of children’s health, and how that has deteriorated in the past decade.

Data from the upcoming review is expected to show that more than 100,000 infants were left waiting for over six hours in A&E in England last year, while 800,000 children and young people are on NHS waiting lists for hospital treatments.

Dr Mike McKean, Vice President of Policy at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, told BBC Breakfast that while the review will highlight some issues that apply to adults as well children, “we have simply got our prioritisation wrong here”.

“When you think about diseases that adults get – whether it’s cancers, dementia or cardiovascular diseases – many of them are because of a lifetime of problems and a lot of them start in childhood.

“If you get it right for children and families… then we know we will have more robust adults who will get less illnesses and diseases,” he added.

Sir Keir Starmer referred to Lord Darzi’s upcoming review in his first major interview this weekend, telling the BBC the NHS had been “broken” by previous Conservative-led governments.