NHS waiting lists are still a top concern for the public, despite the introduction of the 18-week maximum wait, suggests a new survey from Aviva.

The publication of a poll among 3000 NHS patients by Aviva two days ago revealed that 86% believe that NHS waiting lists are too long, with 82% saying that the worst thing about the NHS is the amount of time spent waiting for an appointment with a specialist to find out what is wrong with them.

93% of respondents said that their number one priority was knowing what’s wrong with them when they are unwell, and 88% said that worrying while they wait for their illness to be diagnosed makes being unwell more stressful.

Now today’s release of NHS statistics on waiting times bears out the public perception: the number of patients waiting over thirteen weeks for inpatient care (ie, an operation) was up a staggering 42% to 55,300. And those waiting of over eight weeks for just an outpatients appointment was also up 34.2%.

The time-lines above are highlighted for two reasons:

1. These times mean that from going to the GP to receiving relief of a serious condition can easily take nearly six months.

2. These defined ‘medium’ waiting times have to be the ones examined these days, because for years the Government has been cheating on the ‘standard’ figures. These latter tend to show little or no increase in waiting times – but on that very sub-standard standard basis, the GP to theatre waiting time is nearly ten months.

In fact, it has become standard practice (by Trusts supplying these data to the ONS and DoH) to either (a) shift some longer-waiting patients into the shorter time data set and/or (b) have a blitz on seeing all those waiting a long time in the last part of a reporting period. Thus, because no statistics can be assumed inviolate any more, it is important to look beyond the ‘standard’ figures – because they are so easy to massage or falsify.

So ‘let’s be clear about this’, as politicians like to say, 13 years of New Labour has made dishonesty commonplace, produced no improvement at all….and cost a fortune. Sounds like a summary of the Party’s effect on the UK as a whole, but what of that last point: how much has all this standing still (and sitting around) cost us?

We start with the £21billion completely written off by Patricia Hewitt’s failure to connect for health. (The official figure was £13 billion, but The Slog was shown figures in 2008 completely dwarfing that estimate).

In his book Squandered, management consultant David Craig uses official data to show that New Labour has spent £270 billion more on health – a real increase of 87% – compared to the previous Conservative administration. (The Government openly boasts of having done so).

And thanks to Gordon Brown’s off-balance-sheet PFI accounting disaster, the Treasury gnomes inform me that NHS debt to private construction companies has just passed £80 billion…and still climbing….despite the fact that half the things they built are falling down already.

So £360 billion later, the very patient patient has enjoyed no improvement at all. The taxpayer has been ripped off by private business. And enough money to reduce the National Debt tomorrow (and wipe out the annual deficit at a stroke) has been casually urinated into the sewers of Whitehall.

The Government has pledged to repay half the UK’s debt by 2014. But New Labour doesn’t do repay: it just does spend. You judge for yourselves what the chances of them meeting that 2014 target would be. And be relieved that they won’t be power to miss it.