Palantir cleared 183,000 patients from one hospital's waiting list. Or did it?

A miracle is seemingly occurring in west London. At Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust, the waiting list for outpatients in need of appointments or procedures has been slashed by a whopping 183,061 people, according to data uncovered in a Freedom of Information request by legal charity Foxglove. The reason for the remarkable performance, we’re told, is controversial US tech giant Palantir, and the £330m software it has sold to the NHS in 2023: the Federated Data Platform (FDP). 

The system is responsible for the "digital transformation” happening across the country, health minister Preet Kaur Gill told a parliamentary committee last week. The government claims it is cutting waiting lists by hundreds of thousands, ensuring desperate patients get appointments and operations more quickly. It’s the kind of revolutionary change that — despite misgivings about the ethics of Palantir’s operations elsewhere on the globe — appears to prove the argument made by the government and the tech giant itself that it can deliver the radical digital revolution the under-pressure NHS so badly needs.

Except, when we dug into the data this week, we made a surprising discovery: rather than the number of people on waiting lists at Chelsea and Westminster NHS Trust going down, it’s rising. In fact, over the last three years, as more and more of Palantir’s technology was deployed across the trust, that wait list figure has risen by 20,000. In the last year, ChelWest, as it’s informally known, recorded one of the highest waiting list increases in the country.

We spent the last week speaking to medical professionals at the trust, which has been a vital testbed for Palantir’s foray into the NHS, to understand what’s been happening. They described crowded wards and patients struggling to find beds, even as ChelWest was being held up as a poster child for the rest of the country to imitate. Now, a leading MP on parliament’s Health Committee spoken to by The Londoner has called for an investigation. So, what’s really going on inside Palantir’s standard bearer hospital?