NHS waiting lists for routine operations have hit yet another record high of 6.1 million, the first official data for 2022 show, as the pandemic backlog fails to clear. MailOnline has the story.
An additional 30,000 people were on the list for routine operations such as hip and knee replacements and cataract surgery in January compared to December.
The 6.1 million figure is the largest since records began and two million higher than when the pandemic hit in 2020, when NHS elective care was effectively frozen for months.
Ministers have come under increasing pressure to get a handle on the crisis with charities warning millions of Britons living in pain while waiting for their surgeries.
The number of people waiting over a year to start treatment increased to 311,528 in January, up from around only 1,400 before Covid hit.
The Government and NHS England have vowed to eliminate all waits of more than a year by March 2025 as part of their pandemic recovery plan.
Almost 24,000 have been waiting at least two years for treatment, up from 20,065 in December, and over nine times the 2,608 who were waiting in April 2021.
These patients will be contacted by the end of the month to be offered alternative appointments in places where queues aren’t as long or in private hospitals. Their transport and accommodation fees will be covered.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Just as well we saved the NHS. Think how much worse it would have been if we hadn’t.
Yes we still have the NHS, but it’s Less Serious™️
I had a run in with the NHS on Tuesday afternoon.
It really wasn’t worth what we have been through over the last 2 years in order to save it, based on my experience and the outdated information and absence of any kind of intellectual curiosity I encountered during my appointment.
I was told that the diagnostic tests that I needed to have done “couldn’t be done on the NHS” and the consultant suggested that I should think about ‘going private’.
I got the impression that if I agreed to that, someone somewhere would happily tick a box and say to themselves, “one down, only 5 million and 999,999 more to go.”
No need to worry – ZOE app has lost its Government funding. That’ll buy a few operations. Cease funding Imperial etc., sack Witless and Unbalanced, get rid of testing. Even more treatments paid for.
Claw back the money pilfered/embezzled/wasted on PPE plus T&T, and the furlough losses. Stop wasting yet more on pre-buying Pfizer’s potions, and any other stuff.
Horrifying number of people “routinely” needing hip, knee joint etc replacements …. considering how many of them could have prevented/halted or even reversed this kind of damage and pain simply by changing their diet. :((
Thing is that people following official dietary guidelines is one of the core reasons so many have ended up stressing their joints.
Yup, still pushing empty carbs as 1/3 of our diets, as though our bodies process bread any differently from cake.
Still demonising butter and all fats (actually vital for us!) and recommending tubs of gutter-oil instead.
The absolute state of this.
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/the-eatwell-guide/
Exactly. The official dietary guidelines read like instructions on how to become very profitably i mean of course sadly unwell/unhealthy indeed.
I often tell people (tongue in cheek) that I am a victim of a low fat, low salt, low sugar society.
The sort of society which for too many years is more concerned by all the things their food DOESN’T contain and which feeds better quality food to their DOGS AND CATS.
My other half works in a supermarket and brings home a lot of “waste” food. Recently, it was four lovely lamb hearts.
“People usually buy them as dog food,” she told me.
I recall when the BSE-burger scandal broke in 1990 that it turned out that bovine brain and spinal matter had long since been kept out of pet food, but were considered good enough for the sort of human that couldn’t afford anything better than mystery meat.
We are big fans of hearts and regularly eat chicken lamb, ox and turkey. Never turn them down. We have good small producers. Lovely grub.
It’s odd, isn’t it, how even people who don’t subscribe to the whole “leaves, vegetables and beans are not alive but cute fluffy animals are alive and I don’t want to kill them” doctrine will nevertheless spurn organs but happily eat the rest of the animal. Never understood it.
I blame Hammer Horror, making us look like Dracula or something.
Agree. We get a huge number of pheasants during the season, for free because the shoot would bury them otherwise and very enjoyable too. Obviously they are supplied in their jackets. Over the years I have taught myself how to dress birds. Family members offered free birds will not take them unless I dress them. They happily eat the meat but won’t do the blood and guts. Bloody hypocritical.
Supplies of free birds to family much reduced this season.
I first caught, killed and skinned my first rabbit when I was nobbutalad. Bloomin’ hard work – that skin is on tight. Learned it while visiting my father’s family in Czechoslovakia for the first time. Rabbit’s a bit stringy, though. But when there’s nothing else…
And watching a chicken run around for thirty seconds with its head bouncing around behind on the end of a wrung neck is unforgettable. Not necessarily in a good way, but it teaches you about life and death.
I rewarded my sadly deceased cat by skinning and cooking a young rabbit that he brought home to share.
Love rabbit. And squirrel.
could you come and catch the grey ones which plunder my garden by any chance??
I have become too lazy to pluck pheasants and peel/skin them instead. I cut off the wings and feet first, tie the bird up and work the skin down to the tail, which I snip off last. Fine if the bird is going to be jointed anyway. Plucking is for special occasions only!
When I used to work with a shoot we used to remove the breasts and pack then in trays. They sold very well. (The rest of the bird was buried). Got a bit tedious after a hundred birds or so though.
I skin pheasants too. Actually the skin of a pheasant and its fat is not good eating. I slow cook the legs for use in ragus or pate.
It is all offally good.
Yes, I see what you did there.
My Dad used to eat tripe, but I couldn’t stomach it.
My goodness, I didn’t know that!
According to the holy NHS, “Starchy food should make up just over a third of the food we eat.”
It’s almost as if they don’t want the majority of the population to be able to get off their fat a*ses and take part in protests.
Never having seen this advice until now, I must say I was rather shocked by it. Who makes this stuff up?
Sainted NHS dieticians
If one of them was to offer my dietary advice I’d do the opposite of it.
Someone once did an experiment with a tub of margarine. They put one of the plastic tubs of it in their garage and left it there for something like 2 years.
When they came back, it was unchanged – no mould etc growing on it.
Ergo what you get in the plastic tubs (which they call “spread”) is a form of plastic. Wonder what that is going to do inside the human body but those dieticians do love their “low calorie spreads”.
Meanwhile, butter is full of vitamins which are vital for the body, like vitamin A. And as for the fake news on saturated fat – brain needs sat fats – wonder why there are so many dumb people zombieing around.
Consider exercise – Andy Murray, hip resurfacing. Had resurfacing – the message from the surgeon after I asked about being young for this hip problem. Simply upshot on impact exercise. That’s not on the fag packet. Also vegetarian and BMI within the considered healthy range. Keeping healthy – loads of my super fit friends of old – back problems, knee replacements, arthritis. Plus one friend has sadly eating disorder trying to keep herself slim. Always another tale to tell what!
Joint replacements are due to cartilage degeneration which is part of the ageing process – nothing to do with diet.
Do you know of magic food which reverses the ageing process?
I blame the schools.
“I blame the schools”
Indeed. Sport is simply too dangerous, you see? Head injuries and whatnot, never mind the sort of injuries which might necessitate a plaster and a little lie down for little Johnny, a form filling in and an awkward conversation with over-protective “helicopter parents”.
Truth is, JXB, we’re all to blame…
Reversing ageing process?
Ginkgo biloba. I read it in Hello magazine (back when there were still dentists with waiting rooms) so it must be true.
fisitin
Cartilage degeneration and joint health generally has a lot to do with diet, but not a lot of people know that. Diet has a significant effect on almost all the so called age-related diseases.
I’m betting Bill Gates has some vaccines that could cure all those ills. If only people would queue up and get jabbed like he wants them to.
Global depopulation doesn’t happen by itself, y’know!
only 2 problems with that JD
1. you’d have to trust him first – bit of a deal breaker based on recent experience and
2. you’d want to be given a full ingredient list and a full list of likely side effects – again recent experience doesn’t bode well for that
If only they could think of a way of dramatically reducing the population so these demands were much lower?
The jabs should see to that.
The jabs have probably softened their willing victims up nicely for what will soon be on its way from the Ukraine.
Think of it as similar to recent Ukraine-specific mass culture:
Except this time it will be:
(Note to Daily Mail editors: anthrax is caused by a bacterium, not by a virus, you morons.)
Note
*) Be aware that Easter is a big thing in the Orthodox world, and not just for chocolate.
It isn’t all bad, those tik tok dance routines will stay with us forever.
Until tik tok gets a dicky ticker and crushes under the weight of its own wokeness. Like the rest, twatter, faecesbook et al.
“…two million higher than when the PANDEMIC hit in 2020″
emphasis mine
There. Never. Was. A. Pandemic. Certainly not of the public health variety.
There was only a pandemic of deception, corruption, greed, psychological abuse and denial of necessary medical operations and treatments leading to excess deaths labelled as “covid-19”.
There was also a fairly bad seasonal flu outbreak, which our glorious, benevolent authorities “dealt with” by telling the healthy to “stay at home” and by taking elderly and vulnerable people from hospitals to be dumped into nursing homes, all the while untested for the type of virus which has always been an actual, deadly threat to them and those in said nursing homes.
Disaster. Unmitigated, global disaster.
The NHS doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of making any impact on the waiting lists until they change their mindset. During the pandemic, they’ve been lionised and showered with money at every turn (to write off all the trusts’ historic deficits, build and demolish Nightingale Hospitals, buy unnecessary ventilators etc.), such that they have now become impossible to manage.
Now, if my local hospital trust is typical (and I’m sure it is), they’ve permanently locked-in various pandemic-related measures, including masks, social distancing, and an expectation that all staff will be encouraged to work from home.
Naturally, if you force all staff to wear PPE throughout their entire working day, it’s blindingly obvious that they’ll take the opportunity to work from home whenever it’s permitted, so the staff car parks are noticeably emptier now, and almost deserted at weekends when only the more junior, hands-on clinical staff are expected to attend the hospital in person. Naturally, if only a proportion of your nominal staff are actually attending their place of work, it makes it difficult to re-allocate them to other duties to meet changes in demand, so the whole system becomes hopelessly inefficient.
To add insult to injury, I’ve just listened to a BBC health correspondent (who’d clearly been briefed by the “NHS Blob”) that the only answer will be to recruit another 30,000 staff. Presumably, the immediate impact of this recruitment would be to allow a similar number of their colleagues to follow the trust’s advice and start working from home…
Whenever I’ve mentioned these issues to friends without direct knowledge of the true situation at the hospital, they just can’t comprehend how bad it’s become.
(My wife works as an administrator at the local trust hospital and is one of those junior staff who are forced to work under very difficult circumstances, just to ensure that her line managers and the clinicians are able spend more time with their Pelotons!)
“The NHS doesn’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of making any impact on the waiting lists.”
Indeed That’s the general plan.
As an aside, I entered the outpatient’s waiting room the other day (for an appointment with a private gp as mine apparently no longer sees patients) of a local cottage hospital. All the chairs, apart from five – one at each corner of the room and one slap bang in the middle – were taped up and piled together. Meanwhile, the infirm, some with walkers or walking sticks and obvious mobility problems, are forced to STAND and wait, hoping upon hope that a rare chair might become free. I mean, just why? It is sheer stupidity.
I was amazed to see Savage Jabbit float the balloon of permitting patients to shop around other Trusts or – gasps – the private sector for treatment, with even the travel and accommodation budget paid for.
Doesn’t he know that the NHS is set up to double down on failure than reward success? That patient care and outcomes are an irrelevant consideration
I imagine that he’ll be set straight on this in short order by the Sir Humpheys.
What Jabbit says and what actually happens are two entirely different things.
Oh no! It’s another graph, another pandemic: grab masks everyone, patients self-isolate at home until further notice to save Our™️ NHS

and wait for a vaccine, something…
Or is it just another computer model?
Never mind there are more important things to do like finish off bankrupting the Nation over a far-off foreign war that nobody understands.
Crap from our so called carers.
But don’t forget, the poor don’t have to worry about not being able to afford to get on the NHS (

) waiting list, access is free at the point of non-delivery.
The plan was always destroy the NHS and then bring in private companies to fill the gap. Next up, if everyone pays a little bit each year the waiting lists will be much shorter
Hopefully, as that’s a good plan!
The creation of the NHS was a harmful mistake.
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTU1Eg22Nt-IgaSsvyi2WBgp-27C9Rf2llUOrhxlAK5Q-e_243wsDDLnwhr2MQpZVxPpXY&usqp=CAU
v
Could you elaborate? It’s lost on me.
one was a pic of the 1970s NHS specs available after a long wait and the other was a choice of frames available right then from specsavers
Oh. Thanks.
I wonder if it’s possible to ditch the NHS and set up a people’s heath service with a form of crowdfunding – you know, how it’s meant to work. Isn’t there someone working on this? Is it Claire Craig, or Dolores Cahill or someone I can’t remember where I’ve seen it. I never want to set foot in a hospital or doctors surgery ever again. They can do one.
Don’t worry – ‘safe pair of hands’ Jabbit will sort it out pronto!
He has been saying some startlingly bold things about allowing us (you know, the patients who pay for it) to take our business to any Trust or private practice that we like.
Just words though, it’ll never make it past the Sir Humphreys.
Can you IMAGINE how much graft will be prevented by allowing patient choice?
That’s why it won’t happen.
But the parasites must be fed.
No, it’ll never be possible to go to a naturopath like Dr Sarah Myhill (kicked out of/left the NHS due to asking too many awkward questions) and get a consultation free at the point of us. Nor a doctor practising private holistic medicine, as Dr Sam White now is.
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Destroying the NHS is Saving the NHS.
Truth is Conspiracy
Slavery is Freedom.
You will own nothing and be happy.
Corona in a nutshell: Freedom means being enslaved by dangerous insecurity. Slavery means security and thus, enables people to live free.
and how many people who have actually died because they were not offered treatment sooner? trying to get a doctors appointment is like getting blood out of a stone.
Coronavirus lockdown could cause ‘200,000 extra deaths’ | Metro News
Four weeks for us. Saddleworth.
I haven’t had one for over 2 years now – don’t see that position changing in foreseeable future
even if I was to get one would imagine the GP I might see would have a single clue about anything to do with me.
Not trying to make any point in any direction but in our neck of the woods (South Shropshire) our local doctors practice are literally dragging people off the streets and forcing them to have “face to face” appointments.
Meanwhile our relatives in Stourbridge and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands have more chance of “flying to the moon” than getting a face to face appointment.
Weird or what?
Voters in Ludlow are affluent; voters in Wolverhampton, less so?
Funny you should say that!
It will get worse. You MUST check out the long term plan for the NHS. It is outrageous!
See https://www.longtermplan.nhs.uk/publication/nhs-long-term-plan/
This guy will lead you through it.
Well done Boris and every administration this septic isle set in an over fished sea has had to suffer since the rancid Europhile administration of 1970…You are witnessing the final month’s of the controlled demolition of the NHS, probably, in it’s original form, this country’s greatest domestic political achievement! If you don’t agree with that statement, try and speak to someone who lived before the creation of the NHS in 1948… good luck, a sizable proportion have been murdered via Midazolam and cytotoxin!
The NHS was amazingly setup becvause the state was “more efficient”.
The Book “The Welfare state we’re In” details the disaster that extortion funded treatment rationing has been.
”when NHS elective care was effectively frozen for months.”
It wasn’t ‘elective’ care, it was all care unless you had covid. My dying 88 year old mother couldn’t see her GP and she couldn’t get an appointment at the Regional Hospital of our local ‘Trust’ (yes trust, how bizarre is that). The nurse I spoke to in August of 2020 told me, and I quote “they are not seeing anyone”.
The same healthcare ‘trust’ wanted me to wait 14 weeks for a dermatology appointment in September 2021, for a lesion that a private specialist removed within 20 minutes of seeing it.
Heads should roll, but they won’t, because no one is accountable when it comes to socialised healthcare, which is code for communism by the back door.
Exactly. When everyone owns everything, no-one owns anything and no-one is responsible. A very dark and slippery slope.
A certain Mrs M Thatcher said:
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
There’ll never be another. Bigger balls than all the Trudeaus, Bidens, Putins, Johnsons put together.
Hmm … no one is ever accountable seems to be a very English phenomenon. The prominent example from a while ago was the Grenfell tower fire.
Another would be electricty bills, at least mine: Electricity providers are free to make up completely arbitrary bills unless their customers provide them with timely meter readings. That’s based on the assumption that said customers will always be able to access their meters. In my case, the meter is not part of the flat I’m renting but sits in a locked cabinet in a communcal hallway which is managed by a house management company. But that’s not the problem of the electricity provider who can just charge whatever pleases him most. It’s also not a problem of the house management company, as they don’t get the bills and I don’t even have a business relationship with them, that would be the landlord (who lives in Arabia).
Net effect is my elecrictry provider massively overcharges me all the time (in the area of making me pay for 3 or 4 times the amount of electricity I’m actually using) and absolutely nobody who is in control of anything related to that is responsilble for anything.
All going to plan then.
As surgical operations for the proles are subject to further indefinite delays, the British oligarch whose loving supporters prefer her to any character in a James Bond film is given a superyacht by her friendly government.
Or as the Times newspaper, which proudly carries the oligarch’s family crest on its masthead with her special permission, puts it, there is now a “New £250m ‘jewel in the crown’ national flagship“.
Would more clapping help?
Banging pots & pans on the foreheads of NHS manager might.
DIY surgery is the answer, isn’t it? Your virtual GP can offer advice.
Can’t we somehow blame this on Putin as well?
Interesting that the figures show the root of the problem : adirect Tory assault on the NHS, preparing the way for the pseudemic.
These are fictitious underestimates of problem as they are based on the throughput of Theatres prior to the COVID policies. I have not come across SARS-CoV-2 being transmitted rectally but yet the chairs were dutifully wiped with alcohol in the outpatients holding 1/3 of its capacity. Whitty has ensured mortality and morbidity will increase because of obsession that avoiding a COVID death is the ultimate role of the NHS. We are not, and cannot continue to be blind. Did we really protect the NHS only to discover it cannot protect us?
Wait times in N Ireland are even worse. 5 years to get a consultation appoint and another 5 years for the operation. A lot of people in unbearable pain are despite paying into the NHS all their lives are either using their life savings or taking out massive loans to get the operation privately!
Never mind- they have plenty of money for advertising how much they “care”!