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– 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 recognised as one indicator of how well a hospital is serving its local communities and how well the government is serving the electorate.