Close to 1.2 million people in England alone are being forced to wait for at least six months to access vital NHS services. So much for “Protect the NHS”! And “the waiting list figures are going one way only – up”, warns the Chief Executive of the Patients Association. The Guardian has the story.
The May 2021 figure is almost five times that recorded in the same period in 2019 , before the pandemic hit, and also includes patients requiring gynaecological services.
Senior doctors said such long delays were causing patients to be left in pain, while experts said the full impact of the pandemic may not yet be known. …
Rachel Power, the Chief Executive of the Patients Association, warned: “The waiting list figures are going one way only – up. And they won’t come down until the NHS can deliver activity faster than patients are presenting with new need.” …
Though the vast majority of patients are supposed to be seen within 18 weeks, six-month waiting lists have doubled for ear, nose and throat services and gastroenterology services when compared to the same period in 2020.
The number of patients waiting for gynaecological services stood at 15,647 in May 2019, rising to 48,168 in May 2020 before reaching 87,628 in the same period this year.
Dr Edward Morris, the President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said the college was very concerned that women were having to wait far too long to be diagnosed.
“The current backlog we are facing in gynaecology is made up of people needing clinically urgent treatment, so many women are being left in pain with these benign conditions.” …
In May, more than 336,000 patients were waiting for treatments for at least a year, with almost 21,000 in Birmingham university hospital alone.
The hospital also recorded the longest median wait time, with patients waiting an average of 18 weeks, while some patients were waiting even longer for certain treatments. …
The figures come just before NHS England releases its latest monthly statistics on waiting times for treatments including A&E care, surgery and cancer care, which officials believe will be grim reading.
An NHS spokesperson said: “Despite the significant disruption caused by the pandemic, with staff treating 410,000 seriously ill Covid patients and launching the biggest and fastest vaccination programme in our history, NHS services continued to be available for patients who needed them, and are now making good use of the £1 billion in additional funding for elective recovery.
“The number of routine treatments and operations performed by NHS staff is increasing, with cancer and mental health services back at pre-pandemic levels, and so we continue to urge anyone who needs the NHS to come forward so we can help you.”
Worth reading in full.
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“Stay home. Save lives. Protect the NHS“, they said.
Didn’t work, did it? The NHS is in much worse shape now than it was before.
“NHS services continued to be available for patients who needed them”
My family’s experience suggests otherwise.
“Didn’t work, did it? The NHS is in much worse shape now than it was before.”
Some would say that was always the plan.
No question about it and what better way to assist the depopulation agenda especially when Bozo et al can simply stare in to the camera and say:
“It was covid what done it. Honest.”
Well, it protected the NHS from having to do, erm, anything for 15 months.
Except for the TikTok dances.
And mine.
Yours and a few million others. My experience was that the NHS was already a crapshoot and now it is considerably worse. Frankly I am looking forward to being dead, at home. Even then the wrong thing will be blamed.
Inevitable. You cannot take an under-resourced service, shut a lot of it down and reduce minimal bed capacity further and not create a crisis.
The problem is essentially political – not health related, and is long-standing, with the fiction of the Covid ‘crisis’ deepening long- standing problems.
The NHS is not under resourced it’s very badly managed and the staff benefits are too good, as in all the public sector. Where in the private sector do you get 6 months full pay then 6 months half pay for being off sick? When I was nursing I noticed that the those in the private sector and the self employed took half the time to recover from illnesses and operations that those in the public sector took because they weren’t going to be paid to stay off.
That pattern of sick leave applied when I worked for a GEC company in the late 70’s early 80’s; a Hawker Siddeley company in the 1980’s and RACAL between 1988 and 2002.
The NHS could never have the resources to do everything that people might want. However, it could potentially get at least the basics right.
The NHS is a car crash. My niece spent 7 and half hours waiting for a Doctor in A&E with a broken arm last weekend.
I’m sure our short sighted Politician’s have it all in hand, they’re quite competent lol.
I bet no one’s clapping for it by the end of 2021 !!
Get out your saucepans.Clap, you cretinous performing zombies. Clap what you have achieved.
The NHS is fully signed up to the government (anywhere, any level) proclivity for flatly denying that which is as plain to see as it’s possible. There is little or no truth that they are at pre-pandemic levels, which were anyway nothing to be smug about.
I know it has been said before, but it was NOT the “pandemic” which caused the disruption, it was the lockdowns and other government restrictions, plus the accompanying propaganda. This needs to be said every time the virus is blamed for a political action!
Spot on.
Yes!
My wife had a prolapse operation last October, having waited a year and then another six months “because of Covid”. She was due a follow up appt in January which she was desperate to keep because she was still experiencing discharge and bleeding. The follow up appt was, inevitably, cancelled “because of Covid”.
My wife explained her circumstances. She was told to go and see her GP. She managed to see her GP – a month later – who said he could see the problem but could do nothing about it because she needed to see a Gynaecologist. FFS. Two months later, the Gynaecologist deigned to see her. Said it needed restiched. Booked her in for August. That appt has now been cancelled “because of Covid”.
She won’t let me speak to anyone from “our NHS’ because she knows my piss is on a rolling boil.
Fuck this bullshit. The NHS is not there for you unless your arm us hanging off and they can’t find a way to defer, delay or otherwise postpone doing something.
Perhaps we could bang pots and sound car horns on a Thursday evening for all those people in pain, who missed timely diagnosis and were otherwise screwed by “Our NHS”.
Great to sell it all off, a Tory wet dream.
“We had no choice. It was Covid what did it”
Should have been done decades ago.
But it won’t make much difference as long as we retain the idea that the state should be responsible for people’s health. There seems no way to get rid of that. Can’t just sell it off and be shot of it.
As the UK population didn’t increased this is overtly criminal.
Whilst billions spent on pointless test and trace system, pointless vaccines and economic and societal destructive “lockdown” policies.
Boy if people dont realise now then really it will be years before this ends…
Personally I am young and healty and wont take the vaccine. I feel sorry for all the older people with ailments and illness that could easily be resolved yet NHS services have been removed.
This gov ran the equivalant of the NHS budget again! On this nonsense pandemic. Remember that…
“Disruption caused by the pandemic”.
No, by government restrictions.
‘NHS services continued to be available’?
So that’s why my partner had to spend the price of a small car on an operation, is it?
These spokesmen seem to think they can, yes, lie, and no one will spot them.