By Professor John Robertson
Many thanks to Dottie’s Phone for alerting me to this.
The Guardian today has this shocking news:
The British Heart Foundation (BHF) warns that heart care waiting lists are now at a record high, reaching 414,596 at the end of March 2024 in England, almost double what it was in 2020.
In February 2024, the British Heart Foundation felt this was shocking for Scotland:
Between March 2019 and September 2023, the number of people waiting for an outpatient appointment rose from 8,562 to 23,027. In the last year alone, the waiting list has grown by more than 5000.
I agree it is shocking but how shocking is it? You can compare figures such as these over time and they are, I agree, shocking, on that basis.
You can also compare them spatially or geographically, just in case there’s a wider trend here, based on, for example, people pleasingly living longer and thus living long enough to get onto waiting lists, and on this basis it’s actually quite good news for NHS Scotland and for the people of Scotland and, perhaps, for the Government of Scotland too.
With 10 times the population, all things being equal, England might have been expected to have around 230 000 waiting for heart treatment, but they actually had nearly 415 000.
Nearly, not quite, TWICE as many! Sounds like a crisis in one of these places.
Sources:
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
England’s NHS is for the chop, it’s on life support and the Tories and Labour will pull the plug as soon as they can. They will also destroy the Scottish NHS should they ever get near the levers of power again in Scotland. The US and no doubt others, has been after the NHS for a long time, and unless Scotland secures independence, they will succeed. Terrifying.
LikeLiked by 1 person