Princess Alexandra Hospital paid over a million pounds to remove patients from waiting lists
Health / Tue 9th Jun 2026 at 10:14am
PRINCESS Alexandra Hospital (PAH) in Harlow has been paid more than a million pounds for removing patients from their waiting lists.
The details were revealed in an exclusive article in the Health Service Journal
The article states that in January 2025, NHS England announced that trusts would be paid to validate their elective waiting lists and remove any patients who no longer needed treatment.
It explains that validation exercises are considered best practice, but were not previously centrally incentivised.
Trusts were paid £33 for every “clock stop” over a locally determined baseline delivered through validation in 2025-26, as well as for some other removals agreed between the centre and providers.
The removal of patients from waiting lists through validation played a key part in the service hitting the March 2026 target to treat 65 per cent of elective patients within 18 weeks.
The provider to receive the largest payment from the national validation fund was the Princess Alexandra Hospital Trust. It received nearly £1.2m, despite having a waiting list of less than 40,000 cases.
The reasons patients are removed from the lists are not broken down beyond a broad range of clinical and administrative categories, such as where treatment has already happened, and the waiting list needed updating, or deleting duplicate entries.
NHSE has been previously warned that financially incentivising clock stops could encourage “overzealous” behaviour by trusts desperate to slash their lists and lead to patients being “removed unjustly and their care delayed as a result”.
Others have argued that paying for what should be part of “business as usual” good waiting list administration was rewarding trusts for failure to grip a fundamental process.
YH asked PAH for a comment.
Anna Jebb, Chief Operating Officer at The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT), said: “The validation funding we received was for clock stops both related to validation and treatment. This included situations where treatment has already happened and the waiting list needed updating, or where the clock was stopped in an outpatient appointment or in surgery.
“This work has strengthened waiting list accuracy, supported more timely access to care, and improved the overall safety and management of patient pathways. This has reduced the risk of patients being missed or delayed, strengthening overall performance against RTT standards.
“Funding received was reinvested into additional clinical activity and validation capacity to fully cleanse the patient tracking list and strengthen ongoing waiting list management.
“As a result, data quality has significantly improved and we do not expect to see the same level of validation-related removals in 2026–27.
“We are pleased to have exceeded our 2025 year end RTT performance target, but we recognise that waiting for treatment is stressful and we have more to do to ensure that every patient is seen as soon as possible.”
The full article can be seen in link below
Adam
2026-06-09 11:37:37
Ahh the NHS is great the no longer needed treatment as they either paid for it themselves or simply died. What a state of a country. Someone will be along soon to say how great the NHS is, and how hard its staff work. The UK is a country of NHS and benefits that is all
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