Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of longer waiting times for elective surgery on health inequalities.

No specific assessment has been made. However, NHS England in its ‘Delivery plan for tackling the COVID-19 backlog of elective care’, published in February 2022, set out the principles to minimise the impact of waiting long periods of time for treatment on patients, public, National Health Service staff and health inequalities. This includes a focus on equity of access, experience and outcomes for the most deprived.

The plan also committed to developing a Healthcare Inequalities Improvement Dashboard, which measures, monitors, and informs actionable insight to make improvements to narrow health inequalities. The dashboard is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/about/equality/equality-hub/national-healthcare-inequalities-improvement-programme/data-and-insight/hi-improvement-dashboard/