By Professor John Robertson OBA

Many thanks to Broadcasting Scotland for alerting me to this:

The ONS has recently published cancer waiting times data for the four UK nations, making much of problems in making comparisons without really telling us why and concealing the figures in the text, requiring you to download them.

It’s kind of remarkable given the ease with which Scotland’s worse drug deaths are trotted out endlessly across media reports and on TV panel debates, despite clear evidence from the UK civil servants in 2023 that the figures for England and Wales “underestimate the number by a far greater extent.”¹ 

Here are the data. You can make up your own mind.

Missing the 31 day and 62 day standards

Northern Ireland – 12.1% and 66% (!!!)

Wales – no data and 44.7% (!!!)

England – 8.9% and 33.4%*

Scotland – 5.9% and 29.6%

Notes:

1. *NHS England has a long history of attempting to conceal and fiddle bad news on waiting times, encouraged by the Tory culture of the time but often caught out by the Royal Colleges.³
2. These percentages mean hundreds of thousands of patients in England but only thousands in the other three nations.

Sources:

1. https://analysisfunction.civilservice.gov.uk/blog/comparability-of-drug-related-death-statistics-across-the-united-kingdom/
2. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthcaresystem/articles/waitingtimesforcancertreatmentacrosstheuk/2024-08-23
3. https://rcem.ac.uk/new-report-exposes-real-number-of-ae-waits-as-over-1000-patients-faced-a-12-hour-wait-in-ae-every-day-in-2021/

The OBA – https://scotsindependent.scot/?page_id=116