Matt Morgan: Head, shoulders, knees, and toes-what's next on the NHS waiting list?

Even while ventilators continue to hiss and treat large numbers of inpatients with covid-19, attention has already turned to “what’s next.” The bulging NHS waiting list is an obvious place to start. Over half a million patients in Wales are waiting for non-urgent treatment.1 The Reform think tank predicts that 10 million people could be waiting for surgery in England by April, a sixth of the population.2 The longest waits are for orthopaedic treatments that, unlike cancer, are considered non-urgent despite the pain and disability from untreated disease. Dealing with the inflated waiting lists has been described by the deputy chief medical officer for Wales as a “mammoth task.”1 But I hope that the idea of blindly throwing more of the same resources at the problem won’t survive (much …