Abstract:
One of the government's key public service priorities is to cut waiting times for elective (preplanned) NHS care in England. The government has committed to achieve the NHS constitutional standard that 92% of patients should wait no longer than 18 weeks for elective hospital treatment. Despite the high-profile nature of this target, the dynamics and drivers of changes in waiting times are not well understood. It is therefore difficult to assess how likely the government is to meet this target and how different policy choices might affect its chances of doing so. In this report, we set out to fill this gap. We develop a simulation model of NHS elective waiting times in England that estimates how the full distribution of waiting times could change over time under a range of scenarios. We use this model to set out the impacts of potential policy choices facing the government, and to assess the plausibility of the government reaching the target by the end of this parliament.