Hospitals are cancelling more than 22,000 appointments every day despite the Government’s pledge to clear the NHS backlog. The Telegraph has the story.
The average number of daily cancellations this year, so far, was up 20% on pre-pandemic figures, when around 18,000 were axed every day.
Some patients’ appointments are being cancelled multiple times, the data, revealed through freedom of information requests to English hospital trusts, also shows.
In 2021, 30,267 appointments were cancelled five times or more, compared to 17,884 in 2019, an increase of 69%.
Jeremy Hunt, former Health Secretary, said the numbers were “staggering” and warned that without a workforce plan, more appointments will be cancelled in the future.
Health Secretary Therese Coffey last week set out her “plan for patients” and promised to make progress reducing waiting times for care.
Some 6.8 million patients are currently waiting to start treatment, the highest on record, as of July.
“We expect backlogs to rise before they fall as more patients come forward for diagnosis and treatment after the pandemic,” Ms Coffey said…
Official figures released by NHS Digital this week from all NHS trusts in England show one in 10 (9.5%) appointments, 11.6 million, were cancelled by a hospital in 2021-22. In 2011-12, 6.3% of appointments were cancelled (5.8 million).
Although there have been some improvements since 2020, the number of outpatient appointments carried in 2021-22 were still below pre-pandemic levels, 122.3 million compared to 124.9 million in 2019-20…
Mr Hunt said: “Such a staggering number of cancellations is largely down to one thing – a shortage of staff. We urgently need a workforce plan that addresses this because without more doctors and nurses even more appointments will be cancelled in the future.”
Worth reading in full.
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So Hunt thinks it’s staggering and down to a shortage of staff – nothing to do with Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and creating dystopian working conditions in clinical settings through covid measures. Can’t be because he championed all of these. No chance of him getting through the Pearly Gates.
“… creating dystopian working conditions in clinical settings through covid measures.”
Yep, my wife works two days a week in an office hospital. During 2021->2022, they had all their desks angled so that no one could see nor talk to one another, and the coffee room/common room was monitored to ensure only one person used it at a time. Masks everywhere until recently, and all socializing discouraged.
Charming place to work if your a youngster setting out in your career!
I had some medical issues last year and earlier this year. A nurse told me that if face mask wearing became a permanent feature of the job she would leave the profession.
Perhaps threatening NHS staff with the sack if they refused a certain medical procedure had something to do with it? Perhaps they decided to jump, rather than be pushed. This was entirely foreseeable. Do they think we have forgotten this? (I haven’t read the article, because I don’t want to finance the spin machine.)
And add to this colossal number all those who are now funding their own treatment because they want to end their suffering in a shorter time.
My friends tend to be in their late sixties and early seventies, and as such are more prone to deterioration than most. Almost all surgical procedures are being undertaken privately. Only last night my wife was talking to a former neighbour who has opted to have prostate surgery privately rather than be catheterised for the next 18 months, and among our friends we see all joint replacements being undertaken outside the NHS.
Nothing to do with shutting down the service for 2 years in order for NHS staff to become tiktok stars whilst looking after people WITH Covid. Clealry in Hunt’s world all those people who needed surgery for anything from replacement hips to tumour removal miraculously cured themselves.
The Man along with the rest of politicians and the cadre of Lockdown supporters are deluding themselves and at the same time trying to delude us as to the cause of this backlog, along with the financila mess, and the excess deaths and injuries from their forced medical experiment. Jermey Hunt is responsible along with the rest of them. I suppose cowardice is a small sin to add to the much larger ones he and those in Parliament and their advisors have committed
Mr Hunt said: “Such a staggering number of cancellations is largely down to one thing – a shortage of staff.
Nope. They are down to one thing: your twisted power fetish for closing down an entire country over a historically unremarkable SARS virus that you and your Gates funded plutocratic cartel tried to manipulate to look deadly, but failed. The devastation and misery you have pointlessly and sadistically heaped on to people’s lives is incalculable.
We wish you a Gadaffi style ending in a ditch you utter hunt.
It really isn’t credible for anyone to claim that the third largest organisation in the World, emplying some 1.3m people can be ‘short of staff’.
What the hell are they all doing if its not ‘seeing patients’..
Short of productive staff. Large parts of the NHS management politically hate the majority of people living in the UK. This will obviously limit its ability to acquire and retain qualified medical staff. I certainly wouldn’t want to work for an employer who forces self-prostration procedured onto me because some ‘murican has decreed that I just didn’t chose my parents in the proper way.
Many thanks for such a restrained response.
Well done.
Nicely put PS
The elephant in this particular room is the fact that the NHS is still encouraging all staff to work from home, if practical. At my wife’s trust hospital, the senior management quickly adopted this as their default setting, closely followed by all the clinicians who knew how to play the system. Naturally, senior management wasn’t going to clamp down on the clinicians for fear of prejudicing their own cosy new working arrangements.
The result has been that on a day to day basis, the hospital is staffed by junior clinicians and administrative staff, who have massive chips on their shoulders about the additional workload and responsibilities they face, just so that their seniors can enjoy the benefits of WFH.
Now, when you’re waiting weeks for a follow-up letter after your recent scan, you can understand that the results will probably have been sitting on someone’s coffee table whilst they’ve been doing the school-run, walking the dog, or fetching groceries.
More worryingly, because the clinicians spend so little time at work together, there’s far less likelihood that your results will have been discussed with an experienced consultant who might have been better placed to spot any warning signs or anomalies.
Meanwhile, the public is being encouraged to believe that the additional funding going into the NHS is targetted at improving patient care, which is exactly the opposite of what is actually happening.
Some brilliant point being made here…let’s not forget the burden that PCR testing people with no symptoms causes either…
Anyone who was still alive and who had the Spanish Flu in 1918 would still be testing for it now if it were left to the current idiots in charge of ‘Our NHS’™️
Actually, a sizable subset of anybody would be testing positive for the Spanish flu virus and for all kinds of other endemic viruses as well.
Very good point. One of the mad ideas we need to dislodge from the collective is that testing for stuff and the results of that testing are in themselves worthwhile and/or significant.
It’s a good job we didn’t listen to nutjob conspiracy theorists on the Lockdown Sceptics website who suggested that shutting down the NHS or turning it into the National Covid Service would not save it but actually make it worse.
The biggest irony of all: Lockdowns and related restrictions, an inherently Hobbesian Leviathan-style policy if there ever was one, have made life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, as Hobbes would say.
“We expect backlogs to rise before they fall as more patients
diecome forward…” Ms Coffey saidWell its certainly one way of reducing the numbers on the waiting list!
Surely understaffing and reduced treatments has led to monetary savings. Why not enlist the private sector to help clear the backlog funded by NHS surplus?
I spent 20 days visiting my local hospital to watch a hospital caused family tragedy reach its inevitable conclusion earlier this year. The issues are clear.
I could go on. It’s a mess. £Billions are ploughed into this sclerotic organisation. I’m sure the staff are obeying orders but where has that gone wrong before?