610 patients at the Great Western Hospital Trust died last year while waiting for care on the NHS, as patients face record waiting times.
A Freedom of Information (FoI) disclosure to the Labour Party from 35 of the 138 NHS trusts revealed more than 30,000 deaths among patients on waiting lists in England last year.
This suggests that across NHS England as a whole, around 121,000 people have died waiting for NHS treatment in the past twelve months, a figure higher than it was during the Covid lockdown and double the number of people who died on waiting lists in 2017/18, when the figure stood at around 60,000.
The NHS constitution states that patients should not be waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment, but almost half of patients in England today wait longer than that to receive healthcare. At Great Western Hospital Trust alone, 223 of the deaths were patients who had been waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment.
Ahead of the general election, Rishi Sunak has pledged to cut NHS waiting lists as one of his five priorities however latest data suggests waiting lists are at an all-time high with a record 7.6 million people waiting for treatment, 600,000 more than when he became Prime Minister with a staggering 37,829 of those being on the waiting list for treatment at Great Western Hospital.
Patients facing the longest waits are being offered the chance to travel to different hospitals to skip queues, with plans to extend this to around 200,000 people by October, and the government plans to open more “one stop shops” to deliver scans and tests and also utilise the expensive private hospital system in a bid to cut waiting lists.
Labour’s Parliamentary Candidate for South Swindon, Heidi Alexander said: “Far too many people in Swindon are waiting too long for care, with record numbers of people spending their final months in pain and agony. The basic promise of the NHS – that it will be there for us when we need it – has been broken. The truth is longer the Conservatives are in office, the longer patients will wait.
“Whilst we know that staff and management at the Great Western Hospital are making herculean efforts in the most difficult of circumstances, things won’t change until we get a Labour Government with a proper plan to get our health service back on its feet. We will train the staff needed to treat patients on time again – funded by closing the non-dom tax loophole – and we will reform the service to make it fit for the future.”
