Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust had 165,372 incomplete referral-to-treatment pathways on the last day of July 2026 — the 2nd-longest waiting list of the 146 NHS trusts that reported that month.

NHS England's July waiting-list tables were the only new release of the morning — the prison bulletin and the claimant count both came back unchanged — so today's edition is one dataset, and says so rather than padding.

We watched for the lead rather than found it. When Mid and South Essex's list fell by 5,868 pathways in the June tables, published 13 August, we wrote down that day that the fall could not be read as a recovery while the trust's longest waits were rising, and that the July month would say whether it held. It held: the list moved only 210 further. What kept rising is the number of pathways waiting more than a year — 12,246 in May, 12,484 in June, 13,102 in July, now the largest of the 146 trusts that reported the month — while the share of the list inside 18 weeks, 49.8%, is the second-smallest against a constitutional standard of 92%. The figures say what moved; they do not say why, and neither do we. NHS England did not restate June in this release, so the fall itself stands as first published.

Two trusts that reported in June do not appear in the July tables, which is why the month's table counts 146 trusts where June's counted 148. A trust absent from a month is left out of that month's ranks; it is never counted as zero.