‘I waited 10 months for a routine hospital appointment - then ended up in A&E’

When Pippa Dungey went to her GP suffering from numbness in both her legs last year, she was told she faced a waiting list of 10 months for specialist neurology services.

Two months later, the 25-year-old trainee solicitor, from southeast London, ended up in A&E unable to walk.

Ms Dungey first went to see her doctor in September last year and was referred to a neurologist, but warned to expect a long wait for an appointment.

As she waited, her symptoms worsened, and eventually they became so bad she was unable to lift her right leg and forced to drag it around.

She sought help from A&E and her GP, but was turned away and told she would have to wait for her neurology appointment.

But eventually she was forced to go back to A&E, where she was admitted for a week and unable to walk and was later diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS).

Ms Dungey said: “By November I was really concerned. I couldn’t lift my right leg and was just dragging it around, which was really scary. I felt like I’d been hung out to dry and didn’t know who to turn to. Everyone was telling me that they couldn’t do anything. I even tried to go privately, I was exhausting every avenue and didn’t know what to do."

Ms Dungey was one of the hundreds of thousands of people waiting for NHS neurology services - 6,175 of whom have been waiting for more than a year.

Charity the MS Society has warned people living with MS were waiting an average of five months for their first neurology appointment in 2023-24, a 65 per cent increase on the average wait time in 2019-20.

The charity have warned MS patients left waiting are at risk of “irreversible disability” and have said the government has so far overlooked neurological conditions in its 10 year plan.

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Source: The Guardian, 3 September 2025