ROUTINE planned hospital operations should be carried out at the weekends to cut waiting lists and boost growth, a think tank and a health consultancy recommended tpday.

The proposal for elective surgery currently carried out on weekdays to be carried out at weekends came from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and analysis consultancy LCP Analytics.

Both called on the government to do more to tackle the NHS backlog to “get people off the lists and back to work."

“Currently, it is rare for elective treatments to be performed on weekends,” they reported. “Making better use of this time would significantly boost efforts to achieve a 30 per cent increase in activity by 2025.”

Latest NHS figures show that an estimated 7.21 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of January.

The IPPR and LCP Health Analytics said that there is a compelling moral reason to reduce the backlog, but there is also a convincing economic case to go further and faster.

A Department of Health & Social Care spokesperson said that the numbers of longest waits were falling.

The NHS and government have set a target to deliver about 30 per cent more elective activity by 2024/25 than before the pandemic.

The report's authors say that if this target is met this would deliver an estimated increase in production of £73 billion over five years.

However, the NHS is now short of 120,000 staff, including 47,000 nurses, as the health service struggles with chronic understaffing and workers facing crushing workloads.