Waiting List Conference 2026: From Backlog to Breakthrough

Tackling a vital challenge

With waiting lists in England now exceeding seven million, the impact on patients, staff, and the wider economy is impossible to ignore. The government has set ambitious targets to cut waiting times — but it’s clear that traditional approaches alone won’t be enough.

That’s why the theme of our conference (taking place on 16-17 September), From Backlog to Breakthrough, is more than just a slogan — it’s a shared call to action.

Waiting lists are what systems thinkers call a wicked problem: a complex, adaptive challenge that resists simple solutions and demands new ways of thinking, learning, and innovating together.

That’s why we have brought together some of the leading figures in their field for this event. They include:

Simon Ball, Senior Responsible Officer for West Midlands Secure Data Environment
Lisa Baraitser, Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London
Rob Findlay, Director of Strategic Solutions, Insource Ltd
Michael J Flexer, lecturer at the University of Exeter
Mohammed A Mohammed, Head of Innovations and Academic Partnerships (The Strategy Unit), Employment
Jaideep J Pandit, Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Oxford
Kiran Patel, Group Chief Medical Officer & Deputy CEO, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
Tineke Poot, Head of Elective Recovery Analysis and Modelling at NHS England
Allyson Pollock, Co-Director of Newcastle University Centre of Excellence in Regulatory Sciences
Michelle Rigozzi, Senior Delivery Adviser, The No 10 AI Unit
Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter
Luigi Siciliani, Professor of Health Economics at the Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York
Neil Walton, Professor in Operations Management at Durham University Business School.

About the speakers

Join our online ELAB sessions in the weeks ahead of the conference to gain further expert insights on key issues.

A systems approach

Throughout the conference, we’ll explore practical ways to make progress on challenges that don’t have easy answers. Our sessions will draw on proven principles for understanding and addressing complexity:

Understanding the system – exploring the causes, consequences, and connections that shape waiting lists across the NHS.
Engaging diverse voices – ensuring everyone, from patients and frontline staff to national leaders, is part of the conversation.
Reframing assumptions – challenging long-held narratives and seeing the problem through fresh lenses informed by a diverse mix of methods — from qualitative research and behaviour insights to advanced analytics, simulation modelling, health economics, and systems thinking.
Experimenting and learning – sharing prototypes, pilots, and case studies that have achieved real-world impact, including novel models of care and AI-based innovations.
Adapting and iterating – focusing on agility, feedback, and continuous improvement rather than one-off solutions.
Tackling root causes – going beyond surface symptoms to address the deeper structural, behavioural, and cultural drivers of long waits.

Why now?

The urgency couldn’t be greater. NHS waiting lists continue to grow — and an increasing number of patients are turning to private healthcare for faster access. In 2024 alone, UK private hospitals recorded record admissions, with self-pay treatments remaining well above pre-pandemic levels. The message is clear: system-wide reform and innovation can’t wait.

Hosted by The Strategy Unit in partnership with Health Data Research UK (HDRUK), the conference will also mark the launch of the Waiting Intelligence Network (WIN) — to share learning, scale innovation, and accelerate system-wide change.

Let’s move from backlog to breakthrough — together.

What to expect

The conference is being co-designed by patients with live experience of waiting lists and the patient voice will be represented throughout.

Groundbreaking insights from leading thinkers and practitioners
Practical tools and models for real-world transformation
Cross-sector collaboration and networking opportunities
A shared commitment to improving patient experience and NHS performance

Event details and participation

This is an in-person event.
Places are limited, with priority given to NHS and social care staff. Places are also available for individuals with lived experience and representatives from patient groups.
To join an expression of interest list, .

Stay tuned for updates as we announce keynote speakers and the full conference programme. In the meantime, if you have suggestions, ideas, or contributions that align with the conference or upcoming e-labs, we’d love to hear from you — please get in touch.

Please register your interest to attend the event. Event spaces will be limited to a select group, further instructions on how to apply for a space will be released in due course.

Call for abstracts

Our call for abstracts is now open. Please submit using the form below. Complete abstracts submitted will not be editable but if you require changes, please write to us at Learn@hdruk.ac.uk. Abstracts are accepted in English.

The closing date for submissions is 15 May 2026.

Submitting an abstract does not automatically register you to attend the conference. Please register your interest if you wish to attend.

Join our online ELAB sessions

The conference will be complemented by a series of free focused e-labs in the weeks leading up to the event — including training sessions, international perspectives, and thematic seminars designed to deepen learning and spark new ideas.

Webinar 1: Bring your waiting lists to life with the NHSR Waitinglist Package

This online session led by Tom Smith, Head of Activity Analysis & Forecasting at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, gives an overview of some of the “facts” about waiting lists that are useful for NHS analysts to understand.

Monday, Sep 7, 11am-12pm.

Webinar 2: Understanding efficiency, scheduling and capacity in operating theatres

Join Jaideep Pandit, Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Oxford, for a session on understanding “efficiency” in the context of open theatres. The session will then focus on how best to achieve efficiency and what is meant by capacity in the context of operating theatres.

Tuesday, Sep 8, 11am-12pm.

Webinar 3: Adapting the NHSR Waitinglist Package for Community Waits and Other Areas

Learn how Simon Wellesley-Miller, a Senior Analytical Manager with the NHS England South West Intelligence and Insights Team, used the NHS-R Waiting List package to model waiting times across community services, from deriving required metrics, conducting analysis, and producing waiting list metrics and visuals in an approachable report.

Tuesday, Sep 8, 2pm-4pm.

Webinar 4: NHSR Waitinglist Package in Practice: Modelling RTT Achievements and Misses

This session, led by Amy Makawana, Data Scientist, Analysis & Forecasting Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust, examines how her team has applied the NHSR Waitinglist package.

Thursday, Sep 10, 11am-12pm.

Watch out for details of other ELAB sessions including:

Understanding waiting list using simple metrics
How to use the RTT planner
Waiting ambulances
Newsvendor
Webinar for public and patients.

Supporting your attendance

We value/welcome the involvement of the public, patients and carers with experience of waiting lists at the 51�� Strategy Unit Waiting List conference. To support their attendance we can offer travel and accommodation bursaries (in line with our Honoraria and Expenses policy).

We are not able to offer payment for attending the event, but are happy to discuss any travel and accommodation needs. If you’re interested in applying, just get in touch at learn@hdruk.ac.uk, and we’ll be happy to provide further details.

Conference Speakers

Professor Simon Ball, Senior Responsible Officer for West Midlands Secure Data Environment

Simon Ball is also an associate director of the Health Data Research UK Midlands regional network. He was responsible for establishing 51�� Midlands back in 2018. He was also 51��’s national research director for the Better Care scientific theme between 2018 and 2023. Simon took up the role of Chief Medical Officer of University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in 2019. He was president of the British Renal Society between 2013 and 2016. Simon has an interest in the curation and analysis of high value health data assets and became Health Data Research UK Research Director in the Midlands in 2018. This was based on his longstanding contributions to UHB’s development and implementation of electronic health care records to improve the quality and effectiveness of patient care.

Lisa Baraitser, Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London

Lisa is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research brings together psychoanalytic and social theory to address the temporal, ethical and affective dimensions of care. Her monographs include Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (Routledge, 2009), Enduring Time (Bloomsbury 2017), and she is co-author of Waiting Times: Crisis, Chronicity, and Care (Bloomsbury, 2026). With Laura Salisbury she was co-Principal Investigator on the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project and is currently PI of the Wellcome-Trust funded project Contragestive Time: Pregnant Uncertainties in Fertility Control, a large interdisciplinary project investigating ‘contragestion’ as the future of fertility control.

Rob Findlay, Director of Strategic Solutions, Insource Ltd

Rob is a commentator for Health Service Journal as well as a director at Insource Ltd. He has been a specialist in elective waiting time dynamics since the 1990s, when he created and successfully commercialised the NHS’s first demand and capacity planning model for delivering waiting time targets, before moving on to create the more advanced models incorporating discrete event simulation which are in use today. Rob has assisted hundreds of healthcare organisations and several governments in the UK and overseas, writes a regular column for the Health Service Journal, and takes some credit for England’s 2012 introduction of the waiting time target which remains in force today. Before all that, he worked for an NHS Trust, HM Treasury, and was a research scientist in Cambridge and China.

Michael J Flexer, lecturer at the University of Exeter

Michael is the co-director for public engagement at the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. He has written on Peircean semiotics and the medical case report, temporal disruptions in psychosis, and the semiotics of clinical spaces. His monograph The Madness of Meaning is being published by LUP. He was the publicly engaged research fellow on the Waiting Times project, and now works with people who see, hear and sense things others don’t, to explore the impact of AI and other disruptive technologies on healthcare.

Vanessa Gardener, Chief Delivery Officer, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust

Vanessa has considerable strategic experience with a strong focus on elective recovery, operational performance and reducing waiting times at scale. She is passionate and experienced in transforming services to deliver the best possible care for patients, understanding and delivering small and large scale transformational change. Vanessa is an advocate for collaborative working across MFT and with system partners, with a firm belief in the benefits of shared learning to prevent the unnecessary reinventing of the NHS wheel and an advocate for translational research and innovation.

Olly Harvey-Rich, research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies

Olly's research focuses on the economics of healthcare policy in the UK, including work on waiting list dynamics, workforce policy, and healthcare productivity. His recent work on elective waiting times has considered the trade-offs involved with different policy objectives around waiting lists, and modelled the effects of different interventions on the distribution of waits.

Professor Mohammed A Mohammed, Head of Innovations and Academic Partnerships (The Strategy Unit) Employment

Professor Mohammed A Mohammed is an academic with extensive experience of applied health services research, including quality of care, patient safety and improvement science. He has 100+ peer reviewed publications. Mohammed has delivered scores of highly rated courses on variation, systems thinking, improvement science and mortality statistics to senior and front-line clinical staff in the NHS over the last ten years. He also founded the NHS-R community. Mohammed is currently working in the NHS as Head of Innovation & Academic Partnerships at the Strategy Unit. His main area of focus is innovative decision support systems. He is emeritus professor at the University of Bradford and Visiting Professor at Cardiff University.

Dr Sohail Munshi, Joint Chief Medical Officer, Manchester Local Care Organisation

Sohail was a GP partner in Manchester for more than 25 years and became the CMO of Manchester Local Care Organisation in 2018, with the leadership team then taking on the locality of Trafford in 2019. He is senior clinical advisor to the NHS England National Director for Health Inequalities Improvement and received a British Empire Medal for his services to the community and primary care in 2017.

Jaideep J Pandit, Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Oxford

Jaideep, who is also an NHS Consultant at Oxford University Hospitals and a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, trained in medicine at Oxford with a Double First in physiology and medicine. He has served as Clinical Director of Operating Theatres and as Clinical Advisor to NHS England for Theatres. In addition to medical qualifications he holds a doctorate in operations (systems) management from the Said Business School and an MBA with Distinction. His prize-winning book, Practical Operating Theatre Management is published by Cambridge University Press, and a second edition is due in 2027. He is the first non-American to serve as Editor in Chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia, the world’s oldest anaesthesia journal, in over 100 years. He has received the Royal College Gold Medal 2023 and the Association of Anaesthetists’ Magill Medal 2023 – both these organisations’ highest awards. Among his visiting professorships is one at Harvard, in association with the Beth Israel Hospital, where he co-directs a Masters program in Quality & Safety in Healthcare.

Kiran Patel, Group Chief Medical Officer & Deputy CEO, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust

In addition to his CMO and Deputy CEO roles, Kiran is a consultant cardiologist at University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. He came to that role in 2024 after five years as Chief Medical Officer and Deputy CEO at University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire. He has managed significant transformational change not only in cardiac services but as NHSE Medical Director for the West Midlands (2014-19), Clinical Director at West Midlands Strategic Health authority (2009-11) and Medical Director for West Mercia PCT Cluster (2011-13). In healthcare policy and strategy, he has worked with NICE, the Royal Colleges and the Department of Health for over two decades. He has published papers and books and lectured widely on cardiology and on healthcare systems and strategy.

Allyson Pollock, Co-Director of Newcastle University Centre of Excellence in Regulatory Sciences

Allyson trained in medicine and is a public health physician and academic scholar. She is professor emerita of public health and was director of the Institute for Health and Society and of the Newcastle University Centre of Excellence in Regulatory Science. She is an honorary professor at St Andrew’s University and also at University College London. Allyson’s research interests are in public private partnerships and health systems; long-term care; in access to medicines and appropriate medicines use, and pharmaceutical regulation and regulatory science; and the epidemiology of child and sports injury. She is well known for her active commitment, spanning nearly three decades, to promoting universal public health care in the UK, and her expertise on the negative consequences for the public of privatisation, the use of private finance, marketisation and other aspects of NHS health service ‘reform’.

Tineke Poot, Head of Elective Recovery Analysis and Modelling at NHS England

Tineke leads analytical work focussed on elective care, including conducting national modelling to support the UK government’s ambition to reduce elective waiting times. Tineke has worked in the public sector since 2009, applying operational research techniques to a variety of health areas. Her experience ranges from GP workforce modelling to COVID-19 simulation, but throughout her career she has often returned to working on Referral to Treatment (RTT) waiting times. Notably, Tineke developed the modelling that informed the introduction of the England elective waiting time standard in 2012. She is passionate about using operational research and analysis on complex system problems to inform decision-making within healthcare and government.

Michelle Rigozzi, Senior Delivery Adviser, The No 10 AI Unit

Michelle joined the unit in November 2025 after five years in the No 10 Delivery Unit’s health team, advising three Prime Ministers and driving delivery across cancer, primary care, prevention and elective recovery. Before joining the centre of government, Michelle spent five years in the NHS leading strategy and quality improvement programmes across acute, mental health, community and primary care – improving cancer pathways at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, overseeing over 50 projects at East London NHS Foundation Trust, and co-authoring the business case for the UK’s first £2bn NHS provider merger at Guy’s and St Thomas’. She previously worked as a Senior Research Scientist at a top 100 medical device company. Michelle holds a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, where she modelled how cells respond to mechanical stimuli, and degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Sydney.

Laura Salisbury, Professor of Modern Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter

Laura has published widely in the field of modern literature, particularly on the work of Samuel Beckett. She was co-Principal Investigator on the Wellcome-funded Waiting Times project and is co-author of Waiting Times: Crisis, Chronicity, and Care (Bloomsbury, 2026). Laura is currently a Co-Investigator on the Wellcome-funded project After the End and is also finishing a book called Between-Time Stories: British States of Waiting, 1939-2016.

Luigi Siciliani, Professor of Health Economics at the Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York

Luigi has specialised in the economics of hospitals and has published over 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His research interests include waiting times for non-emergency treatment, hospital quality, patient choice, pay for performance and coordination between health and social care. He is a Senior Expert Adviser for the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies. He was a member of the European Commission Expert Panel on Effective Ways of Investing in Health in 2017-2022. Prior to joining the University of York in 2003, he worked at the OECD in Paris for two years to conduct an international project on policies to reduce waiting times in healthcare, and collaborated with the OECD over the year on international reports on the same topic.

Neil Walton, Professor in Operations Management at Durham University Business School

Neil's research focuses on applied probability and queueing theory for optimal congestion management. Queueing and congestion is critical in many applications; interests include, but are not limited to, internet congestion, road traffic, online advertising, electricity systems, cloud computing, service systems, AI/ML, quantum communications, and NHS waiting lists. He is an Area Editor for Stochastic Models at Operations Research. He is also an associate editor at the journal Stochastic Systems. He has won the best paper award at the ACM Sigmetrics conference.

Event types

51�� Event