Year-long waits for hospital care worst since 2008

New data shows that the number of people waiting over a year for hospital treatment in England has hit its highest levels since 2008.

The number of patients waiting 12 months or more has increased sharply this year. In February, the figure stood at just 1,600, but now nearly 140,000 of the 4.35 million on the waiting list at the end of September are shown to have been waiting over a year.

Many leading health bodies are warning that the situation could become even worse during winter with the NHS seeing rising numbers of coronavirus patients.

John Appleby, director of research at health think tank the Nuffield Trust, said that hospitals were facing a real battle to keep non-coronavirus services going, highlighting how the number of coronavirus patients in hospital had risen from just over 2,000 to more than 10,000 since the end of September.

He said: "It is clear that over the summer months, NHS staff have put in tremendous amounts of work to boost activity across the board. However, the service has fallen short of the tall order of recovering all non-Covid activity between the two waves of this pandemic."

Alongside routine care, significant numbers have missed out on treatment for cancer. The numbers receiving urgent check-ups have dropped by a quarter during the pandemic, with 300,000 fewer people seeing a cancer specialist from April to September than during the same period last year. The numbers starting cancer treatment are also down by a fifth.

An NHS England spokeswoman said that cancer services had returned to pre-pandemic levels of activity by the end of September.