The Herald front page ‘exclusive’ on paper and online this morning, above.
The opening pitch:
In Scotland, nearly 7000 people have been waiting over two years for an operation compared to just 559 in England. But what’s really going on behind the figures?
Doctors have described Scotland’s NHS recovery as “appallingly slow” and accused ministers of “taking their eye off the ball” when it comes to driving down the backlogs of patients who have been waiting years for surgery.
They go on to wander carefully around the evidence without finding the most important data. Here they are:
From the BMJ on February 10 2023:
More than three million patients waited longer than 18 weeks for treatment in England in December, the highest number on record, show data for the NHS in England. In November 2022 a total of 2 902 274 waited 18 weeks or longer, and in December this figure rose to 3 051 661, the data on referral to treatment times show.1
Despite the government’s commitment to cut extremely long waits, with a target to eliminate NHS waits of over 18 months entirely by April 2023, the number of patients waiting at least 18 months rose from 48 961 in November 2022 to 54 882 in December. Overall in England 7.2 million patients await treatment.https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p332
All things being equal, in the same month, December 2022, you’d expect Scotland to have 305 000 but in fact it had only 20 448 waiting over 18 weeks.
14.52 times more, per head of population, waiting longer than 18 weeks in England than in Scotland.
The UK Government and NHS England have been sneaky again, as they did when they began restarting the clock for A&E patients, after they had been triaged.
They knew how the media feasted on stories of patients waiting more than two years and regardless of the seriousness of the cases, threw money at them, rushing them through private hospitals and at the expense of other targets.
Source:
Why will not one media health correspondent in Scotland report this?
Or this
Released by NHS England, under pressure from the RCEM, after years of publishing data underplaying the extent of 12 hour delays in A&E, this now reveals the data from the time the patient arrives in the A&E, as opposed to time from a decision to admit as was case under old measure.:
Of all the total attendances in February 2023, 126,000 waited more than 12 hours from arrival
at A&E (10.6%)https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/ECDS-Supplementary-Analysis-Statistical-commentary-Feb-2023.pdf
From Public Health Scotland for the same period using the counting procedure only now used by NHS England:
4,751 (4.4%) patients spent more than 12 hours in an A&E department.https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/publications/ae-activity-and-waiting-times/ae-activity-and-waiting-times-month-ending-28-february-2023/
England has 10 times the population so, all things being equal, might be expected to have had 48 000 waiting more than 12 hours. It had 126 000, nearly 3 times more.
Talking-up Scotland 
Why are newspaper allowed to BLATANTLY LIE
on stories surely the PRESS ASSOCIATION STOPPED WITD WEST REPORTING
after the Hacking of Young girls Phone
Are they just lying to PA YET AGAIN
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Pauchlin’ the figures as we say in Scots
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Newspapers , BBC to and radio plus most other radio and to in uk are not news broadcasters they are propaganda tools for Westminster but why wouldn’t they be ? after all they get to run business without paying taxes their companies registered offshore or government funded.
Newspapers in uk are used as a government tool
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Yep the propaganda works or they wouldn’t deploy it.
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Follow NHS matters at WPress, the info re England’s NHS is very interesting, and scary.
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Let’s be under no illusions here, “rushing them through private hospitals and at the expense of other targets” was not going to happen with NHS Trusts already fiscally on their knees and “bedroom tax” Tories grudging every penny, my bet is on re-classification, essentially lying.
Helen McArdle’s piece is straight out of the Mike Cokehead handbook of confusing the reader with changing subject, throwing around large numbers, then throwing in %ages with no reference source whatever https://archive.ph/bjsEd
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It would appear that outsourcing to the private sector is not good for your health
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(22)00133-5/fulltext
This article covers the period up to 2020. Outsourcing to the private sector in order to reduce waiting times in NHS ENGLAND has increased in the past year or so therefore it would be interesting to find out if the adverse outcomes have also increased.
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By far the greater problem is manipulation of public perceptions in England to suit HMG’s political agenda.
On the rare occasions such reference publications feature in the media, there is always an accompanying political response carefully crafted to minimise the issue.
What troubles me most is data from Trusts being manipulated at source for political as well as commercial ends.
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This is the way the UK play dirty , use the media to trash Scotland at every turn and the natives will believe it , show that the SNP are not fit to run a devolved country never mind an independent one and you can forget independence!
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The above headline/article is the reason I have never bought a newspaper, nor listened/watched a U.K radio/tv channel since Sept. 2014.
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