Patients sitting in waiting room. Confident doctor and nurse are walking in corridor. They are in … [+]
Experts have called on the U.K.’s new prime minister to act as the country’s hospital waiting lists continue to rise.
Official figures released Thursday shows around 6.8 million people in England were waiting for elective procedures like cataract surgeries and hip replacements in July.
This is an increase of approximately 100,000 on June’s results, and an increase of roughly 2.4 million since the start of the pandemic.
But the number of patients waiting a very long time has fallen in recent months, following a drive to eliminate two-year-waits.
Dr Layla McKay from health industry body NHS Confederation praised the “amazing effort” of health leaders and their teams for “driving down waiting times” despite demand for healthcare hitting “an all time high.”
Hospitals and other providers are performing many more of certain procedures than they were before Covid-19 hit.
The policy director added in a statement: “Cancer treatment, diagnostic tests and GP appointments are well above pre-pandemic numbers and the numbers of people waiting longest for their operations have now received treatment.”
Although Covid-19 has put enormous pressure on the country’s National Health Service, experts say the disease has served to excacerbate issues that existed long before the pandemic.
A recent analysis from the Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation think tanks suggested 5 million people would still be on the waiting list now if the pandemic hadn’t happened.
As elective waits continue to grow, a concurrent crisis in emergency care is seeing patients endure extremely long waits for for ambulances and for treatments in A&E departments.
One recent analysis from the Financial Times suggested this crisis could be leading to hundreds of excess deaths in England every week.
On Thursday, Nuffield Trust chief executive Nigel Edwards told new British Prime Minister Liz Truss she was inheriting a health service ‘in critical condition.’
“This crisis has been years in the making,” he said in an statement. “As our analysis published on Monday shows, the pandemic simply served to ramp up pressure on an already beleaguered health service, with staff shortages, a failure to tackle social care and inadequate investment putting the NHS on the back foot when Covid hit.”
He said Truss needed “a relentless focus on the workforce, social care and hospital buildings”
McKay echoed his concerns, saying: “There is no hiding from the fact that both the NHS and social care are in the most challenged state they’ve been for decades, and the coming months are set to be some of busiest on record.
“The NHS is reeling from a decade of austerity and two years of the pandemic, something which the new government must now urgently address.”
She called on politicians to invest immediately in both health and social care, warning that funding for one should not come at the expense of the other.
“The government must not rob Peter to pay Paul; if they do, NHS leaders will then face impossible choices on what to prioritise for their patients.”
