Next time someone tells you that Labour and the Conservatives are identical

[andrewducker]

Notice the trend up throughout the 90s as things got worse and worse, and then the trend down shortly after Labour took office?

They may have done a lot of things wrong, but the NHS is a lot better off than it was.

From

Comments

[iainjcoleman.livejournal.com]

It takes 5 years to qualify as a doctor, plus a year or two to know what you're doing. Labour created something like 5 new medical schools, and expanded student places at others. So about 5 years after they were first elected, lots of new doctors started work, and another year later they were actually effective. (The OECD says that we went from 1.9 doctors per 1000 people in 2000 to 2.5 doctors per 1000 people in 2007. Nurses went from 9.2 to 10.0 per 1000 people over the same period. pdf link.) I think this may have at least something to do with the 2002-3 decrease.

Yeah, that sounds pretty plausible, especially given those OECD numbers.

It seems likely to me that waiting lists will have a vicious circle - with a long waiting list, the average treatment is carried out on a sicker person (because they've waited longer for treatment), and is therefore more complicated and takes more resources, so the number of treatments that can be carried out falls, so waiting lists lengthen. If this is true then the cause of the big increase in 1996 may well be several years earlier.

Fair enough, but then we have to wonder what caused the equally sharp drop in 1998. A change in clinical priorities such that the number of treatments increased, a change in recording/classification practices such that people were removed from these figures without necessarily being treated, or something else?