The number of people waiting to start hospital treatment has risen to 4.95 million in England alone, according to the latest NHS figures. “It’s the highest number since records began back in August 2007,” Sky News reports.
The Express and Star has more.
Data from NHS England also showed that the number of people having to wait more than a year to start hospital treatment stood at 436,127 in March.
This is the highest number for any calendar month since August 2007, when the figure was 578,682.
In March 2020, the number having to wait more than a year to start treatment was significantly lower at 3,097.
This record again highlights the disruption caused to the nation’s health by a year of lockdowns and the NHS’s focus on Covid. The number of people admitted for routine treatment in hospitals in England was up 6% in March 2021 compared with a year earlier – but for many, lockdown has already taken its toll.
The Express and Star report is worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The NHS is to receive £160 million to help tackle this backlog. The Guardian has the story.
Hospitals will use the money to buy mobile CT and MRI scanning trucks, put on extra surgery in evenings and at weekends, and look after patients at home in “virtual wards”…
NHS England has designated groups of NHS trusts working together in 12 parts of the country as “elective accelerators”. They will be given up to £20 million each if they manage to carry out 20% more planned activity – diagnostic tests, operations and outpatient appointments – by July than they did at the same point in 2019-2020, before the pandemic struck.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press 2: NHS consultants are asking for a “minimum 5% pay rise” and have produced a glossy brochure setting out their case. “After a year in which the NHS has experienced its greatest crisis, and in which consultants have been leading on the frontline since day one in the fight against COVID-19, it is time that consultants were rewarded fairly for the vital clinical leadership they bring to the NHS,” it says. No mention of the ~20% of all people hospitalised with Covid having caught the disease in hospital.
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This is about as surprising as a ‘dog bites postman’ headline. And we read today that the NHS has told GPs to formalise their ‘screen all patients online’ approach. Using the word triage to describe this approach is an abuse of the language. Triage is a invaluable tool for A&E departments, handling a crisis, to determine which patients should have what treatment as it’s carried out by qualified emergency department staff.
Getting unqualified and frankly medically ignorant receptionists to do this job is disgusting and against the medical principle of “first do no harm”. And how does this work where patients have no online access?
But never mind eh? We’ll be protecting the NHS so that’s OK.
And just watch the BMA realise they have a strong negotiating position once again. GPs will do less work so they need more money.
This has the putrid odour associated with all of Wancock’s cunning plans.
What is the point of being registered with a GP any more?
You might as well remove yourself from the list and go to A&E if you are seriously ill. For minor illness you will probably do better treating yourself, losing weight, improving your diet and taking vitamins. GPs aren’t really interested in treating chronic or minor illness any more.
GPs are paid for every patient registered with them. Mine does not deserve any money.
They’ve thought of that. During the pandemic it was impossible to access our local hospital’s A&E without first getting the visit signed off by the NHS 111 service. (I sense that this rule was applied in other areas too.) As you say, GP’s practices are paid by the number of patients registered with them, and then they are contrcated to provide a basic level of services, many of which (cancer screening, blood tests etc.) can actually be performed using more junior staff. There are currently no qualified GPs operating from the locked doors of my local GP surgery, and I have little expectation that they will ever return.
I don’t think it’s just chronic or minor illness, either. As far as I can see, the GP is often just the staging post for being got rid of into the hands of the hospital as fast as possible. Hand-washing at its finest, in tune with the times.
You don’t get a backlog of operations etc because ill people have failed to get through the GP system. That results in less demand for operations etc not more. You get a backlog because hospital staff are overwhelmed looking after Covid patients.
I share your concerns about the GP service and it might lead to people dying because of late diagnosis etc, but it doesn’t account for this particular problem.
I bow down to your insight and experience regarding this country’s health care provision.
What discipline are you in?
No particular discipline – retired IT with a few minor academic qualifications in the data and statistics area. Is it important? The argument stands on its own logic. If less people than usual are getting on the list for operations then the backlog should decrease not increase – right? If you spot a flaw in the argument then please explain.
Give me strength…….
So no flaw in the argument?
Right, let’s say x number of patients started off their path of ill health before the NHS closed its doors. Over time, new patients present with complaints, let’s say number z.
The sum of x + z (multiplied by time) = the patients needing health care – the number of patients who died awaiting healthcare.
The time it goes on, the worse the complaints become (or they just die). No model offers a favourable outcome to denying the community primary healthcare.
I studied medical statistics and worked in the NHS at the strategic level, I love arguing with a retired IT help-desk monkey on the internet.
It may help you to visualise running a bath with both taps on, the plug in and being surprised that your bathroom floods.
Let’s be clear. The statistic we are talking about is the number of patients who have had to wait more than a year for treatment. That’s the headline.
They do not make it onto that list until a GP has seen them – unless they went through A&E – right?.
So any bottleneck getting to see a GP in the first place will slow down them appearing on the list.
To use your analogy. The GPs are like an isolating valve that drastically slows down the water getting to the taps. Of course there may be all sorts of problems in the supply leading up to the isolating valve – that’s the people at home suffering because they couldn’t get to see a GP – but it will help the situation in the bath not hinder it.
What is wrong with the simpler explanation – hospital resources were incredibly stretched last year and could not keep up with demand?
(I suggest we stick to the data and the logic and go easy on the personal remarks. I am quite confident in the relevance of my experience and qualifications but I don’t think arguments from authority are worth much.)
“You get a backlog because hospital staff are overwhelmed looking after Covid patients”
Your evidence for that statement? Any data? And your logic is fundamentally flawed.
Are you seriously challenging that hospital staff were put under immense stress during the two peaks? I really don’t want to be bothered to assemble the evidence if you actually accept it and are just playing games.
Please point out the flaw in my logic.
Some hospital staff, definitely, especially in intensive care. Most hospital staff, absolutely not. The hospitals were half empty, whole departments closed down, no outpatient appointments etc
Helenf
Thank you for a sane and polite response. This is actually a distraction from my main point which is that difficulty in seeing a GP cannot account for an increase in times waiting for treatment. However, it is interesting to try and understand what did cause the increase in times waiting for treatment.
I agree that it was only certain departments and resources that were stressed. So why were other departments closed down or operating at lower levels than usual? I can think of three reasons:
I don’t know how you measure the relative significance of these three things. At the moment it all seems to at the level of personal or secondhand anecdotes. Maybe you have more data or evidence? I am open to persuasion. It is only on the role of GPs that I will need a lot of convincing!
I have a friend/ex-colleague, an ITU nurse, who was furloughed. Let that sink in. Normally, critical care staff are redeployed to other departments, every other department were quiet too.
You know fuck all about health care provision, you have fuck all experience with caring for people in extremis in challenging times.
I have.
Now fuck off.
Winston
I am not going to continue the debate with you as you seem determined to reduce it to personal insults and obscenities. I have spent much of the last year in direct contact with the NHS because I was diagnosed with myeloma in March 2020 and have since had two stem cell transplants. This has given me ample opportunity to talk to NHS staff at many levels about the strain that Covid put on them.
Let’s leave it then, you clearly have no professional insight about health care provision.
Good luck with your continued treatment.
My GP surgery already does this by all appointments being initially a telephone triage by a GP. It means that the things which require to be dealt with by a GP but don’t need a face to face are, an appointment at the surgery is made for the same day, often within 15-20 minutes of the telephone triage & it results in all patients phoning in each day having a GP deal with them. A huge improvement on waiting 2-3 days for an appointment.
Depends on how it’s implemented….
GPs should be very wary of the stampede to telephone ‘triage’. If they aren’t seeing patients face to face, they don’t need to be employed in the UK at all. NHS Call Centre Bangalore anyone.
Traditional UK Primary Care systems look expensive and look from outside as if not much is really happening, until you try to implement something new, which invariably works less well and is far more expensive.
Hancock wants to convert Primary Care contact to be run by AI systems. God help the old, confused or ill, because the NHS won’t, as it has proved in the last 14 months.
You are right about primary care being expensive and at present it is totally dysfunctional, serving little purpose.
GPs have been all too happy doing the odd telephone/Zoom appointment from bed or the cottage in The Lakes, that is for the plucky few that can get past titan Mary on reception and just won’t be fobbed off with 111 or being directed to clog up A&E.
Not a bad life for doctors on the best part of £200K plus their Covid pay off and now many of them now seem quite content to be cooperating in their own redundancy. Never mind though, I’m sure Mary will pull through manfully without them.
GP’s are about as replaceable as someone in 1st line support with a flow chart…
I’m surprised my GP hasn’t asked if i’ve “turned myself off and on again”…
Go private, get better, protect yourself from the N”H”S (if only you could get your tax back from the shambles).
I know somebody who’s son (in his early 40s) who earlier this year was feeling unwell and was complaining about stomach pains. He had several telephone consultations with his GP who diagnosed indigestion and gave him something for it.
However, the condition got worse and he was unable to physically see a doctor, until the pain got so bad he went to hospital. Where he was diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer. From going to hospital to death was 3 weeks.
If he was physically examined when he first started noticing symptoms then they could of done something about it. A GP cannot physically prod or prob somebody over the phone and this needs to occur if certain conditions are to be caught early.
we keep waiting for the world to change….
5 million – so equivalent to the population of Scotland all waiting for treatment.
1.4 million work for the nhs, more than 1 in 50 of the population. 5 million sick needing treatment, so roughly 1 in 13. So, to illustrate, if you have 1000 people, 20 of them work for the NHS and 77 of the 1000 need treatment. Shouldn’t be a problem, should it?
Unless the NHS has become a self-licking lollipop, and only exists to grow itself and invade society at every level.
I don’t understand your point. It is certainly a problem that we have an aging population and therefore a lot of people need treatment. Of course this ranges from cancer to ingrowing toenails. Sick people need a lot of resources. The NHS is not particularly inefficient compared to other health services.
It doesn’t seem to have much to do with lockdowns or coronavirus. If you read the article you will see that the number needing treatment dropped during the height of the epidemic and then resumed an upward trend that has been going since 2009.
The NHS is very efficient compared to other healthcare systems as long as you don’t look at survival rates:
“The myth of NHS being the envy of the world was exposed in Kristian Niemietz’s book Universal Healthcare without the NHS, which found: “In international comparisons of health system performance, the NHS almost always ranks in the bottom third, on a par with the Czech Republic and Slovenia.”.
https://.org.uk/the-nhs-is-not-the-saintly-institution-of-the-popular-imagination/
That’s a long and complicated debate. The report you quote is from the Institute of Economic Affairs which is hardly a neutral institution. That is not to say the report is wrong but it needs a lot more than a quote from it to make a case.
In any case, and I don’t claim the NHS provides a stellar service and I don’t claim it is very efficient. I just claim that it is not outstandingly inefficient in the sense that what you get out of it is proportionate to what you put it into it. It would be interesting to know how many people are employed in health care in other countries – but very tedious to find out.
Every little helps.
The genocide has stalled and needs a little kick start – here it is.
The biggest drawback I’ve found with DIY medicine, assisted by Doctor Google and others, is that, having once diagnosed (or misdiagnosed) one’s problem, obtaining the appropriate medicine is often impossible, as the GPs still hold prescribing rights. This may not be a problem if you already have a prescription and just keep renewing it online, but it’s no help if you need a new or different prescription for an existing or new condition.
One way or the other, having destroyed large parts of the nation’s health over the past year, none of this is going to improve it. £160m is a sticking-plaster figure to cover the small scratch on the patient’s body, not the gaping wounds inflicted from head to toe.
Any bets on when there’ll be another effing “app”, that doesn’t work, trotted out as the panacea for this.
Speaking to my neighbour, out walking his dog, he mentioned that it was easier to get into the vets than the local GP. We concurred that the GP outfit was otherwise pretty damn assiduous in hassling people for vaccinations, by phone, text messages and by letter. Surprising how much an incentive £12 per punctured limb is.
Yes, I have a friend who is a medical professional, she says there is no point in going to see a GP until you already know what is wrong with you and what treatment you need. Private blood tests were available pre Prof Wormtongue’s mess, helping diagnosis.
But I expect euthanasia kits will be rolled out to us shortly, helping protect the NHS really properly.
Interesting how the Wah! NHS is the only system suffering from alleged overload, with the systems in Europe/ Japan etc able to cope admirably.
Its almost as if the whole concept is not fit for purpose.
Does this mean there will be less time for Tik Tok dancing?
So the stories about the Italian system (for example) being overloaded were just a mainstream media fiction?
Maybe too few of us have died during the “pandemic”, so the Powers That Be are doing their best to get more of us by stealth/ sloth in the rest of the healthcare system?