The NHS Told Me I Had to Wait Over a Year for My "Urgent" Prostate Operation

I have long been a fan of the National Health Service (NHS), especially as so many members of my extended family have worked or are still working in it. My mother, mother-in-law, father-in-law, two of my sisters, sister-in-law and three nieces have all treaded or continue to tread the wards of the NHS.

My early years experiencing the health service were good and straightforward. When required, one picked up the landline telephone, spoke to a receptionist at any time of the day and made an appointment with either the doctor or dentist, at a time that suited. However, and sadly, my experience recently has left me thinking that it is time for a different approach to the way we treat the health of the nation.

I am a 60-year-old man with a health problem common in men over 50, prostate enlargement. In the U.K. one in three men suffer from enlarged prostates, whilst one in six are diagnosed with prostate cancer. My route to my operation started routinely. I recognised the problem, managed to call my local GP surgery and made an appointment with a doctor and a nurse for a full medical. As a result I had to have a scan on my bladder, and this also happened in a timely manner.

However, my experiences of the NHS took a dive once I received a phone call from my doctor, one Friday evening requesting that I urgently attend the Accident and Emergency department to have my bladder drained of urine, as the amount that I was holding and unable to release was starting to impact on my left kidney. I arrived in the A&E department at 8:30pm; the unit was packed. Where have all these people come from and what were they doing here? Eventually, I was seen, catheter fitted, and taken up to a ward at 3am. I was informed later that a wait of six hours in A&E was “a short one”. The following afternoon I was discharged, having been told by the consultant that my left kidney was fine, there was no sign of cancer in my prostate, but I would require an “urgent” operation to reduce the size of my prostate.

An urgent prostate operation on the NHS, I was initially informed, is 24 weeks, so I braced myself for the wait. I absolutely hated wearing the catheter, it prevented me from doing so much, and the thought of having it attached to my leg for the next six months wore me down mentally. I waited six weeks before I called the Urology Department, just to make sure that I was on the waiting list. The receptionist confirmed that I was, but my wait was now 58 weeks, some 64 weeks after my initial visit to hospital, and 40 weeks longer than I was initially informed. Remember, I was told that my case was “urgent”. I was informed that if I wanted to challenge the length of time that I had to wait for my operation, I had to contact my GP.

The following morning I called at 8am – you now can only call first thing in the morning if you want an appointment to see a doctor. I waited 40 minutes on my mobile, only to eventually get through to be told that there were no appointments available and I had to call back the following morning, which I did, with the exact same outcome.

This is the point that I decided to go against my principles and have my operation privately. My operation took place mid-February 2024, some 12 weeks after my November visit to A&E. The period between November and February dealing with the NHS was mixed. As mentioned, I failed to get through to the GP’s surgery. I had to call 111 on a couple of occasions. One time, after eventually getting through, my GP practice in Eastbourne was not listed on the NHS computer, so we spent several minutes going around the houses as I explained that the GP practice that was listed had closed several years ago and I had been transferred to a new one. I also had a second visit to A&E at the request of the 111 service. It turned out that I had a bout of pneumonia, diagnosed after another six hours wait. The community nursing team was brilliant, arriving at my home when that said that would.

The surgeon who carried out my operation was the same man who would have done it on the NHS. What was it Aneurin Bevan said in 1948, “I stuffed their mouths with gold”, referring to doctors and consultants being able to continue with their private practices if they accepted NHS patients.

During my time of recovery I spent a bit of time researching various aspects of the NHS and not a lot of this research filled my heart with joy. In England we spend £181.7 billion on the NHS annually. Twenty-five million working days are lost each year due to staff sickness. £136 million is spent on giving away medicines that can be purchased over the counter at any pharmacy or supermarket. 7.7 million people are waiting for an operation. 19% of NHS staff come from abroad, whilst 5,000 doctors left the NHS in 2022 to work in different parts of the world.

So much has changed since the National Health Service started way back in 1948. We can now expect to live, on average, 13 years longer, the population has grown by 17 million people and the diseases that our forefathers once died of are now treatable.

Taking everything into consideration – my own experiences, those of my family and friends who currently work int the NHS, the publicly available facts and figures – I feel that it is time a massive overhaul of the way we care for the U.K.’s population. I predict that the main political parties will be falling over themselves during the upcoming general election to ‘Save the NHS’ or ‘Invest in the NHS’, but none will promote the idea of a different approach like the social insurance models that work so well in other countries or consider the idea of privatisation.

I am no expert in medical matters, but what I do know is that £180 billion that is currently being spent is not delivering a service that is fit for purpose for the 21st century.