Waiting Times in the Welsh NHS

BBC Wales recently ran an item comparing waiting times in the Welsh NHS with those in England. Surprisingly they failed to mention any of the balancing arguments.

It was left to the Assembly deputy Health Minister Vaughan Gething to put the whole story together.

It’s not a new thing that waiting times in Wales are longer than in England. They were before the Assembly was ever formed.

Under Welsh Labour this difference has been reduced but as Nigel Edwards of the Nuffield Trust stated, ‘the whole of the UK (NHS) is having problems. You spend less and you get less’.

In England the Tories decided to reduce social care spending in order to protect certain parts of the NHS, not all of it.

The Assembly in Wales took a decision to look at the Health and Social care together. Vaughan Gething explained that in Wales, ‘we took a decision to look at the whole spectrum together because we recognise there is no consequence free choice that we could make given the cuts made to our budget’. Nevertheless, Wales spends more per head on patients than England.

Social Care in England is under very real pressure and delayed transfers of care are going in the wrong direction. Up to 5000 at the end of August in England, down to 430 in Wales in 2015 from 800 a month in 2005.

Also mental health in Wales has much shorter waiting times and better outcomes than in England.

The Kings Fund report of October 2015 says that the English NHS is facing a toxic mix of financial deficit, rising waiting lists and low staff moral, with 82% of NHS organisations expected to be in deficit by the end of the financial year. 9 in 10 NHS directors believe that cuts in social care budgets are adversely effecting NHS services, and 27% of NHS Finance Directors say that caps on agency staff will affect their ability to ensure s

The Nuffield Trust report April 2014 compares NHS performance in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and states;

So, the main conclusions from this latest analysis are that, so far, the different policies adopted by each country appear to have made little difference to long-term national trends on most of the indicators that the authors were able to compare. Individual countries can point to marginal differences in performance in one or more areas. This lack of clear-cut differences in performance may be surprising given the extent of debate about differences in structure, provider competition, patient choice and use of non-NHS providers across the four countries.

As Vaughan Gething said on the Today programme, ‘don’t take my word for it, go and read the reports’.