Report

The elective care backlog and ethnicity

This report from UK think tank the Nuffield Trust looks at variation in treatment rates for routine hospital care, both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In England there is a huge backlog in routine hospital care, with more than 7 million patients waiting to begin hospital treatment as of August 2022. It is now well documented that Covid-19 and associated lockdowns resulted in a huge drop in the numbers of hospital operations, tests and consultations taking place. This had a disproportionate impact on people in more deprived areas – and these groups already had higher levels of health care need than those in less deprived areas. Once Covid arrived, differences began to arise in how many of these operations, tests and consultations were ‘lost’ among different ethnic and social groups during the first two years of the pandemic. This research looks at variation in treatment rates for routine hospital care, both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. It considers changes in elective activity overall and specifically in relation to seven groups of common hospital procedures across five main ethnic groups (White, Mixed, Asian, Black and Other). Our focus is on ethnic variations, but we also consider variations by deprivation and region because the proportion of ethnic minority groups is higher in more deprived areas, in cities and in some regions.