A new report released this week found the Britain's National Health Service is in dire condition and providing substandard care in many areas. The report was commissioned by the Labour government shortly after it took power. It's author is a British surgeon and member of the House of Lords, Lord Darzi.

The report was the result of a nine-week review by the independent peer and NHS surgeon Lord Darzi.

He was asked by Labour, shortly after the election, to identify the failings in the health service, but his remit did not stretch to coming up with solutions.

His findings present a stark picture of a service which he says is in "serious trouble" with declining productivity, "ballooning" waits and "awful" emergency services that put patients at risk.

The BBC's description actually downplays the problem with wait times pretty significantly. The report itself cites emergency room waits that are contributing to thousands of additional deaths each year.

In 2010, 94 per cent of people attending a type 1 or type 2 A&E were seen within four hours; by May 2024 that figure had dropped to just over 60 per cent (and for all three types of A&E combined, performance is now at 74 per cent). More than 100,000 infants waited more than 6 hours last year and nearly 10 per cent of all patients are now waiting for 12 hours or more.  

According to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, these long waits are likely to be causing an additional 14,000 more deaths a year—more than double all British armed forces’ combat deaths since the health service was founded in 1948. 

And the situation in hospitals is also bad with many people waiting over a year for treatment.

The promise is that for most procedures, treatment will start within 18 weeks. In March 2010, there were just over 2.4m on the waiting list, of whom 200,000 had been waiting longer than 18 weeks. Of those, 20,000 had waited more than a year. By contrast, in June 2024, more than 300,000—fifteen times as many—had waited for over a year, and 1.75 million had been waiting for between 6 and 12 months.

Cancer mortality is also up relative to other countries thanks to increased wait times.

The 62-day target for referral to first treatment has not been met since 2015 and in May 2024, performance was just 65.8 per cent. More than 30 per cent of patients are waiting longer than 31 days for radical radiotherapy.  

The new PM Keir Starmer has vowed to issue a 10-year reform plan soon. That plan will apparently go beyond just fixing the NHS to expanding what the British call "social care." That includes care for the elderly, poor and disabled beyond hospitals and emergency rooms.

Fixing social care must be part of any plan to build an NHS for the future, the Prime Minister has said, but he declined to give further detail on the Government’s plans for the sector...

Addressing a conference hosted by The King’s Fund, the Prime Minister said: “We want that national service. We will start with the staff and build up from there with a vehicle for the consensus that we need.

“But the challenge is absolutely right. We have to fix social care because I don’t think it’s possible to build an NHS for the future if we don’t fix social care as we do it. And that makes the challenge greater.

All of this sound like it is going to spectacularly expensive. For now, the Labour government and Lord Darzi are having a fine time blaming the NHS's problems on the prior conservative government. There some truth to that, but we'll have to wait and see how enthusiastic people are about these grand reforms when the price tag is revealed.