The claim
“Last June, he ordered the NHS to stop enforcing Labour’s 18-week waiting time target, and as a result of that, the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks has gone up by 69 per cent.”
Ed Miliband
The background
The issue of how long it takes to get treatment on the NHS continues to be a hot topic at the dispatch boxes.
FactCheck has already shown how both Ed Miliband and David Cameron have used different measures to come to opposite conclusions about NHS efficiency under the Coalition.
At Prime Minister’s Questions today the Labour leader unveiled an eye-catching new statistic. But does it add anything to the debate?
The analysis
In 2008, Labour introduced a new target for hospitals: treat 90 per cent of patients within 18 weeks of the point at which they are referred for treatment by a doctor.
In June last year, the Coalition announced that the target had been scrapped.
In fact, getting treated within 18 weeks remained a legal entitlement under the NHS constitution and statistics continued to be collected by NHS Trusts, which may be one reason why David Cameron announced this week that it was making a comeback as a piece of Government policy.
His war of words with Ed Miliband, with both claiming that average waiting times are moving in opposite directions, has become so heated that it has led to repeated claims from Mr Cameron that his opposite number has been misleading the House of Commons on the issue.
As FactCheck pointed out in a recent post, Mr Cameron has been using the median average (the number in the middle of an ascending list of numbers) to show that waiting times have been going down.
The figures for March – the latest available from the Department of Health – do indeed show a slight fall in the year-on-year median waiting time, from 8 weeks in March 2010 to 7.9 weeks in the same month this year.
Mr Miliband has so far preferred to dwell on the percentage of patients treated within 18 weeks, which paint a different picture. That figure has been falling persistently but very slightly from a high of 93.3 per cent in July last year to 89.6 per cent in March this year.
A dip below 90 per cent is technically a failure to reach the target, but it’s a tiny shortfall and a very gentle decline, so where does Mr Miliband’s 69 per cent come from?
Suddenly, after weeks of dwelling on Labour’s target, the Labour leader has suddenly decided to quote from a completely different set of figures that aren’t readily comparable.
His press officers explained that he was now looking at the raw numbers of patients who have been waiting for longer than 18 weeks:
May 10 20,662
Jun 10 22,440
Jul 10 21,120
Aug 10 19,547
Sep 10 23,542
Oct 10 23,191
Nov 10 25,936
Dec 10 19,952
Jan 11 26,450
Feb 11 29,565
Mar 11 35,003
They say he was comparing the figures from May 2010, when Mr Cameron came to power, with last month, and there’s a 69 per cent difference between 20,662 and 35,003.
That’s perfectly true, but it’s hardly the whole story.
For a start, the order to scrap the target was only announced in June, so you would have to start with the figures from July if you wanted to show that anything had happened to waiting times as a result of the targets axe.
That makes the percentage slightly less, but still shows an increase compared to March this year.
More importantly, the figures haven’t been getting consistently worse. They go up and down, with a sudden spike in March this year which may or may not be a statistical blip.
And how helpful is it to look at a raw number of people instead of a percentage (the thing Labour has been using to measure the target ever since it was brought in)?
On that score it looks like the treatment success rate has been falling under Mr Cameron, but very slowly and gradually, a fact Mr Miliband’s headline figure of 69 per cent fails to get across: but then a fall from 92.9 per cent in May 2010 to 89.6 per cent is obviously less politically dramatic.
The Verdict
Talking about a raw number of patients instead of a percentage gives Labour a much more dramatic figure to brandish, but it’s far from the whole story.
The two leaders are still using different sets of figures to come to wildly different conclusions, and it’s difficult to come up with a definitive answer on which is the better measure to use.
Independent experts like the King’s Fund have long pointed out that different statistical measures have their advantages and disadvantages, and need to be considered together to get the fullest picture.
For example, the think tank also plans to track how many weeks 95 per cent of patients can expect to wait – a figure that excludes some statistical blips.
The 95th percentile figures, like the overall percentage, show a slow but steady increase in waiting times over the last year, something the Coalition will no doubt be keen to reverse now they have decided to keep the 18-week target alive.
FactCheck will be watching their progress closely, and Mr Miliband will of course be keen to point out any failures.
As far as his 69 per cent figure goes, we’re going to have to conclude that he’s technically right, but his latest attempt at statistical warfare is of little use in helping us understand what is really going on in the corridors of our hospitals.
By Patrick Worrall
