Talk:National Health Service England waiting list at highest on record for second consecutive month

PDF
when citing PDF's please make sure you mention somewhere: what comes from the PDF and on which page to look at. •–• 05:50, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
 * OK. --JJLiu112 (talk) 05:53, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

Wording
"The Guardian reported other issues, including that nearly 25% of patients in emergency departments waited over four hours to be seen, and 75% of cancer patients were seen within two weeks of cancer screening or their GP's urgent referral, below 90% and 85% targets, respectively."

I'm having difficulty interpreting this sentence. It sounds like 25 percent of patients are waiting >4 h for care, which is below the 90 percent of patients NHS expects to wait >4 h. This sounds like it should be inaccurate, or, at least, phrased confusingly. The figure of 75 percent of cancer patients waiting <2 weeks for care being below an 85 percent target does sound accurate. —chaetodipus (talk &middot; contribs) 05:44, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * While we are at it,, if you are reviewing the article, please move it to "National Health Service England waiting list at highest on record for second consecutive month" before publication. •–• 05:47, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

Re: edits
In addition to minor grammar errors uncontested, I edited the following, and for the following reasons:

1). 'Figures' is cleaner than 'data', and I don't think it's directly conflicting with the lede of either the Guardian or Sky articles, which read "official figures show" and "The number of people in England", respectively.

2). Not every country uses the comma as denoting the separation of thousands. Thus, I replaced it with the full word in every instance possible.  The style guide is ambiguous on this subject: "Either a comma or a point is acceptable" in the case of decimal fractions, but sure why risk it?  People will get 'four thousand' and '4,000' either way.

3). The Wikipedia article is titled "general practitioner", not "general practitioners". Thus, the 's' is not included in the link.

4). A&E has already been established as the 'accident & emergency department'. There is no need for a wordier replacement.

5). Fixed wording as per talk.

6). 'Cases in England' is flat-out wrong.

Let me know if you have any more concerns, or. --JJLiu112 (talk) 06:07, 10 July 2021 (UTC)


 * I was specifically trying to avoid the use of the word "figures" as the Guardian uses in its lead, to keep the wording distanced. A wording like "Figures published Thursday indicated the number of patients in England waiting for treatment by the National Health Service reached 5.3 million in May, the highest since records began in April 2007 for the second consecutive month" would help avoid having a similar sentence structure to the guardian as well.
 * On the numbers, the general guidelines is numerals where greater than 30, but four thousand is 4,000 all the same.
 * If linking with square brackets, Diseases yields Diseases, with a blue s, plus it's just cleaner visually to include the s
 * A&E is an unfamiliar term outside the UK/Commonwealth, but it's fine that way too
 * "Cases in England" was the original wording. —chaetodipus (talk &middot; contribs) 06:26, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * In some countries, 4,000 means Four, and 4.000 means four thousand. I would really prefer if we avoided ./, as much as possible because we have struggled with that in the past and I would rather have a slight deviation from the SG than to look back in some time and argue about the magnitude of the number. •–•  06:31, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks! --JJLiu112 (talk) 06:31, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
 * I think the context at least makes it clear we're talking about thousands of people and not ones or hundreds of them. But that's really something to address in the SG another time. —chaetodipus (talk &middot; contribs) 06:44, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

actually, it does not -- and we have experienced the problem about the same, in the past. Precisely this. •–• 07:24, 10 July 2021 (UTC)