The Waiting List

For thirty-one years Lorraine Ashby has decided who is ill enough.

She does it by phone, from a desk on a trading estate in Gateshead: forty-five minutes, nine questions, seven more, and a lifetime of listening for the thing people do not say.

Then the service buys Kestrel. It reads every referral and every word of her notes, and gives each person a number: how likely they are to benefit from a human being. The high numbers get a therapist. The low numbers get an app.

Jacqui Rowell scores twenty-three. School cleaner, carer for her mother, missed appointments before. Lorraine knows she needs a person. The panel listens politely. The number stands. And the number, infuriatingly, is usually right.

So Lorraine does what good nurses have always done for the patients they believe in. She learns which words the machine likes, and she starts writing them down.

Every time somebody goes up the list, somebody else goes down.

A sharp, funny, humane story about care, judgement and the people who wait.