How number of patients on NHS waiting lists could DOUBLE – & some may have to wait until 2028 for treatment
ARTIST Pamela Leonard has been waiting for a replacement hip for well over five years.
Pamela is 65, lives with constant pain and is almost bed-bound. She can stand for just ten minutes at a time and her hip dislocates several times a day.
The extreme painkillers she takes cause disorientation and confusion, while risking opioid dependency.
Her GP where Pamela lives in Holyhead, Anglesey, told her the only way she can get her hip done at the moment is if she falls and breaks it.
Pamela’s son Russell is a huge supporter of the NHS but has become so upset watching his mother’s “ongoing nightmare” that he set up a to raise the £15,000 Pamela needs to pay for her op privately.
Pamela’s case is an extreme one — thankfully. But while making a new programme for Radio 4, I came across many other heartbreaking cases of people stuck, suffering, on waiting lists.
There is a family man aged 34 in need of heart surgery who has waited three years for his op. He lives in daily fear of a fatal heart attack.
Then there is a retired nurse in Norfolk facing a four-year wait for a knee replacement.
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The stories go on. No doubt you will have heard your own. One story may be about your own predicament.
Because the sheer volume of people on waiting lists is staggering. They are now of record proportions.
Officially, six million people are waiting in England and another 1.2million in the rest of the UK. That adds up to more than a tenth of the population.
The backlog is worst in Northern Ireland, where one in four are waiting.
All of those people on waiting lists are now caught up in a battle between No10 and the Chancellor.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson was going to announce yesterday how the NHS will clear the backlog.
But the publication of the NHS Elective Care Recovery Plan has been postponed after ministers failed to sign off the draft document.
Insiders say the Treasury is refusing to give its approval until it gets assurances on specific “tough targets” it is demanding in return for funding.
The Government have said they will spend £8billion over the next three years clearing the backlog. Chancellor Rishi Sunak, not unreasonably, wants that money to be spent as efficiently as possible.
Meanwhile, Health Secretary Sajid Javid blames Omicron for the delay.
And there is another shocker. The waiting list could nearly DOUBLE in the near future, to 13million.
Millions of people were afraid to go to their doctor during Covid.
VIRTUAL WARDS
We know, for example, there were 240,000 “missing” urgent GP referrals for suspected cancer.
These people are simply missing. Some may already have died.
When they do show up in the system, nobody knows what kind of shape they will be in.
Meanwhile, the British Heart Foundation reports there were 6,000 “extra” deaths from heart disease between March 2020 and January 2021 in England compared to what would be expected in normal times.
So as we all play another waiting game, while these arguments over the targets are settled, let’s look at what might happen.
We know some of the money will be spent on improving diagnostic services, on making hospitals more efficient with better IT, on new surgical hubs and more beds. There will also be innovation.
For example, in Croydon, South London, the local hospital has dealt with its backlog by creating a new elective care centre.
They did it simply by walling off a section of the old hospital — something that prevents staff being pulled away from performing routine operations into the emergency rooms.
There are also plans to release patients who have had treatment early into “virtual wards” where possible.
This means patients are sent home with monitoring equipment, such as super-charged Fitbits, that detect heart rate, blood pressure and oxygen saturation.
Some patients will then be able to do the final part of their recovery at home.
And follow-up appointments after routine treatment will in some cases become on-demand, not automatic.
There will also be a new webpage, My Planned Care, to allow patients to find out how long they must wait and to help prevent them going downhill as they do.
There will be more strategies on top of these.
But without seeing the overall plan, there is no way to either see if it will work or give patients a better idea of what they can expect.
The Government have said they want to set a target for the NHS of doing 30 per cent more activity to clear the backlog.
Some experts doubt this is achievable.
One senior medical source I spoke to said it could take until 2028 to clear the backlog across England. Others suggest three or four years.
That is no consolation for the millions of people like Pamela Leonard, who is now facing her sixth year on the waiting list.
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- Natasha is Health Policy Editor of The Economist. The Backlog starts at 4pm tomorrow on Radio 4 and on BBC Sounds.
