Waiting list deaths

A colleague experienced atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeat). It significantly increases the risk of stroke (up to fivefold), heart failure, and dementia. His doctor said his ECG was the worst he’d ever seen, and he should go into hospital straight away. The NHS told him the waiting time to be treated was 16 weeks. He went private and was treated on the same day by having electric shocks to stabilize the heart’s rhythm. If he’s waited the four months to be seen, he might well have died.

It is difficult to gain accurate figures for the number of UK people who die before the date of the NHS appointment that might have saved them.

Between September 2024 and August 2025, around 79,130 names were removed from NHS waiting lists across 127 acute trusts because patients had died before reaching the front of the queue. Of those, 28,908 had been waiting longer than the 18-week statutory standard, and 7,737 had waited more than a year.

NHS England cautions that the data does not record patients' causes of death, and that in many cases the cause of death "will not relate to the condition for which the patient was awaiting treatment." In other words, dying while on a waiting list is not the same as dying because of it; some proportion of those people would have died regardless.  

A more clinically meaningful figure comes from emergency medicine research. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that long waiting times are likely causing around 14,000 additional (excess) deaths per year, more than 268 per week, related specifically to waits of 12 hours or longer in A&E.

The 18-week waiting time standard has not been met since September 2015. As of December 2025, only 61.5% of patients were being treated within 18 weeks, against a target of 92%.

The blunt summary tells us that roughly that 79,000 people a year die while on an NHS waiting list in England, and about 29,000 of those having waited beyond the legal 18-week standard. The number whose deaths can be directly attributed to the wait itself is harder to pin down, but the Royal College of Emergency Medicine puts wait-related excess deaths at about 14,000 a year. Lord Darzi’s 2024 review into the NHS described this figure as ‘deeply alarming.’

It does make it rather difficult to sustain the fiction that the NHS is second to none, the best in the world, the envy of mankind.

Madsen Pirie