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Hospitals in England that fastest improve waiting times for care will be rewarded with a share of millions of pounds of extra investment in buildings and equipment, Wes Streeting will announce on Monday.
The Health Secretary’s decision aims to encourage NHS leaders to meet the target that 92 per cent of patients wait no more than 18 weeks to start non-urgent treatment after being referred to a consultant.
Last month, the Prime Minister, Mr. Keir Starmer has injected new urgency into the standard, first put in place by Tony Blair twenty years ago, when he named it one of six “milestones” of his administration and promised it would would be respected by the end of the current legislature.
But this target has not been achieved for almost a decade, as austerity, the pandemic and the growing demands of a growing aging population have added to the strain on health services.
Ahead of Monday’s announcement, Department of Health officials told the Financial Times that additional funding for capital projects – such as new high-tech scanners or much-needed maintenance of services – would be available to NHS trusts that have made the greatest improvements in meeting the 18 weeks. orientation towards a standard of treatment.
Performance would be measured by the percentage of patients seen within that time frame, they said.
The lure of additional capital funding will resonate with a service that has long lagged behind comparable countries in terms of the amount invested in infrastructure.
In a government-commissioned report last year, Lord Ara Darzi, a surgeon and former health minister, identified a capital shortfall of around £37 billion.
Streeting said some hospital trusts were already leading the way, carrying out surgeries “in innovative and more productive ways”. This government will support them with new capital investment and let them overcome the backlog.”
Trusts that have treated more patients should be paid more for their work “and good performance should be rewarded to encourage good performance – that’s how we will reduce waiting times”, he added.
The proposal will form part of an elective reform plan, to be published on Monday by the Government and the NHS, which will set out how the health service will return to the 18-week standard.
This campaign is supported by £25.6 billion announced for the NHS in the October Budget. Ministers say the extra money will fund 2 million more appointments within a year, but health officials have warned “confusion” about whether to prioritize the achievement of performance objectives or the winter increase in admissions.
At the end of October, according to the latest figures available, patients were waiting for 7.54 million procedures and appointments. About 40 percent of people had been waiting more than 18 weeks.
Pressures on the NHS were underlined on Friday by data showing a sharp increase in flu cases during the holiday season. More than 5,000 patients were hospitalized with the virus at the end of last week, almost 3.5 times more than the same week in 2023.
Ministers are also facing a backlash from campaigners and opposition parties after Streeting said on Friday that a new commission studying how to overhaul the welfare system would not present its final report until 2028.
It has been more than a quarter of a century since the publication of the first in a series of major inquiries into social care, which has long weighed heavily on the NHS but was barely mentioned in the 2024 general election.
