NHS/GIG comparisons

 Steve Barclay's clearly political empty gesture in offering hospital places to patients on waiting lists in Wales caused me to look into the differences between the bases of the two nations' waiting time statistics. (It is an empty gesture because the places offered would be in private hospitals, as the Telegraph article makes clear but for some reason the BBC headline did not. Either the patient or GIG in Wales would have to pay for the privilege.) I had been led to believe that the Welsh statistics are more realistic in that the statistical clock starts ticking at an earlier stage in the process of treatment. The Welsh Chief Statistician's explanation bears that out to some extent:

The key difference between England and Wales concerns some types of diagnostics and therapies. In England only ‘consultant-led’ pathways are reported, whereas in Wales some non-consultant led pathways are counted as well. We believe that most of these pathways in Wales fall into two groups: direct access diagnostics and Allied Health Professional therapies (for example physiotherapy, osteopathy). We estimate these account for at least 88,000 of the 755,000 open pathways in September 2022. This is based on the types of activities we’ve been able to identify, but the true number could be higher.

If we remove these 88,000 pathways from the total open pathways for Wales, that leaves around 666,000 open pathways. Based on our current understanding, this would be a more comparable measure with England than our regular headline statistic (though as stated, there may be more than the 88,000 non-consultant led pathways that we’ve not yet been able to identify). For Wales this would be equivalent to around 21% of the population, or one open pathway for every 5 people. The 7.1 million pathways in England are equivalent to 13% of the population, or one pathway for every 8 people.

From this it would appear that there is still a disparity in favour of England. This blog has in the past criticised the Welsh government for not taking more drastic action to improve health outcomes (and it looks as if actual cuts are on the way*), but at least the direction of travel in Wales is better than in England. While the Tory administration is intent on driving doctors out of the NHS, increasing privatisation and presiding over record high waiting times, these are coming down faster in Wales in a rather more collaborative working relationship between professionals and government.

* Coincidentally, the last big health service cuts in Wales were also when Plaid Cymru were involved with Labour in government