Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said record numbers of people are ‘spending their final months in pain and agony, waiting for treatment that never arrives’
A staggering 121,000 people died while on the NHS waiting list last year, according to shock new data.
Figures released under Freedom of Information laws reveal numbers dying while waiting for hospital treatment are even higher than seen at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
They suggest that double the number of patients are dying on the waiting list than before the pandemic. The NHS constitution states that patients should not wait more than 18 weeks for treatment, but two in five patients today wait longer than that.
Freedom of Information requests by the Labour Party to every NHS trust in England indicate 40,000 people died last year after waiting for more than 18 weeks for NHS care. Shadow Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “Record numbers of people are spending their final months in pain and agony, waiting for treatment that never arrives.