A list of people waiting for admission to hospital usually for treatment of non-urgent disorders.
A term widely used in the NHS to show the number of people waiting for hospital admission, usually for non-acute surgery. The size of the waiting list has come to be perceived over the past 20 years especially by politicians as a measure of the service’s effectiveness. To the individual patient, however, what matters is the ‘waiting time’ how long they have to wait from first seeing a doctor to receiving the required treatment. This measure is increasingly recognized as one indicator of how well a hospital is serving its local communities.
A form of health care rationing that is used especially in the distribution of scarce resources, such as organs for transplantation.