Patients “left in the lurch” as month long waits for last minute cancelled ops to be rearranged more than double

EMBARGO: 00:01 MONDAY 26 MAY 2025 

Close to 20,000 operations cancelled at the last minute took more than 28-days to rearrange last year, in breach of the NHS’s own standard, research by the House of Commons Library commissioned by the Liberal Democrats has revealed.

It means that 23% of the 85,400 elective operations cancelled at the last minute in 2024/25 took longer than a month to rearrange. This represents a three-fold increase on 2015/16’s figure of 7%.

The Liberal Democrats said the figures showed patients being “left in the lurch” as they waited for “potentially life altering operations”. The party called on the Government to end its “embrace of dither and delay” and take action on rebuilding crumbling hospitals and end the crisis in social care “so crucial to fixing the underlying problem in the health service”.

The data also shows that the number of last minute cancellations breaching the health service’s 28-day standard has also risen significantly from 9,000 in 2015/16 to 19,400 last year. That represents an 115% increase on the waits for rescheduled last minute cancellations a decade ago. In the past year alone the number of these breaches has jumped by around 1,500, up 8% to the highest level post the pandemic.

The data also revealed a breakdown on NHS Trusts with the most breaches of the 28-day standard. The Trust with the highest number of breaches that had not experienced a recent merger was University Hospitals Leicester with 942 and then followed by Surrey and Sussex Healthcare with 710.

Of the 108 NHS Trusts that reported full data for each year since 2015/16, 73 saw a rise in the number of breaches.

Liberal Democrat Health and Social Care spokesperson, Helen Morgan MP said:

“Patients are being left in the lurch, forced to wait in pain and distress for potentially life altering operations. Each of these delays represents an extra month that someone's misery is prolonged.

“This is the devastating legacy of the Conservatives neglect of this NHS, but the Labour government is proving aimless in how to turn this around with ill-thought through reforms and kicking vital projects into the long-grass.

“This embrace of dither and delay on building new hospitals or fixing the crisis in social care, so crucial to fixing the underlying problem in the health service, is failing patients. It is time Ministers realised this and showed real ambition in ending these unacceptable delays and getting patients the care they deserve.”

ENDS

Notes to Editor:

The House of Commons Library research can be found here. Please note that year on year changes may be related to Trust mergers. It was not possible to provide data for the three financial years from 2019-20 to 2021-22 as the NHS publication was paused during the Covid-19 pandemic.