The Cabinet Secretary said the £28m funding “will target the longest waits in orthopaedics, general surgery, ophthalmology and gynaecology by increasing capacity for more people to be seen and treated through overtime and more regional working”.

Will it work? A quick search on the Welsh Government website finds previous similar announcements: £50m in 2017, £30m in 2018, £50m in 2019, £60m in 2022. All of which is ‘extra’, but evidently not the same thing as ‘enough’.

At national level, waiting times are a function of activity falling persistently behind demand so that a waiting list builds up; of some local services having much longer waits than others; and of patients being booked in the wrong order. In the long run, activity falling short of demand is the dominant factor, and that is what these multi-million pound top-ups are intended to address.

So why doesn’t it work?

There are several reasons. The NHS may not have enough core capacity to keep up with demand, meaning that these waiting list initiatives are not really ‘extra’, but rather short-term ways of temporarily bridging the gap.

There may be missed opportunities around the demand for healthcare: not everything the NHS does helps patients make progress along their pathways. For example, a patient might be booked into the wrong clinic, or before a diagnostic test instead of after it.

There may be misallocation of resources: money being spent on capacity in a service whose real problem is that patients are being booked out of turn. Those booking processes are themselves a cause of long waits, and may be influenced by perverse incentives coming from government.

Here at Insource we understand these problems, and support the NHS with solutions. So if any of this sounds familiar – and these issues affect all the UK’s nations – then drop us a line. We’ll be happy to explore which of them affect your part of the NHS, and how they can be solved at minimal expense.