It’s long been known and accepted within business that figures will be ‘fudged’ to give a more favourable report on their performance.
Take a look at Estate Agent’s house descriptions – often not the same in reality.
Today Times Radio reported on the results of their Freedom of Information request from all healthcare trusts in the UK and found there are over 15 million people waiting for their hospital NHS appointments having been referred by their GP for further investigations. Times Radio went on to report the Government’s official figures of this waiting list is just over 3 million as their stats are not centralised.
It’s accepted tough decisions needed to be made during the pandemic but there seems to be no clarification on whether the 15 million is accumulative backlogs from prior to the pandemic or if this figure is due solely to the decisions made to protect the NHS during the pandemic.
Either way it seems unacceptable to ‘fudge’ figures when lives are at risk.
We’ve already seen countless people who have discovered their unknown cancer has now spread as they couldn’t be seen during the pandemic. For every individual there is a family who will carry the lifelong scars of these tough decisions.
Whatever the real figure, we can’t change what’s happened but we can come up with a solution to address this backlog now.
Will there be action or blame shifting?
Jane James's Consultancy Limited 