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Found 798 results
  1. News Article
    Mental health patients who arrive at emergency departments (ED) in crisis are increasingly facing ‘outrageous’ long waits for an inpatient bed, with some being forced to wait several days. HSJ research suggests ED waits of more than 12 hours have ballooned in 2022, and are now around two-and-a-half times as high as pre-Covid levels. Early intervention for patients in mental health crisis is deemed to be crucial in their care and recovery. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said the findings are a “massive concern”, while the Royal College of Psychiatrists described them as “unacceptable”. RCEM president Katherine Henderson said the experience of mental health patients in accident and emergency departments “is not what it should be from a caring healthcare system”. She said: “We have massive concern for this patient group. We feel they are getting a really poor deal at the moment. “The bottom line is there are not enough mental health beds. There are not enough community mental health services to support patients and perhaps therefore prevent a crisis and the need for beds in the first place. “Mental health crisis first responder teams work – a mental health practitioner working with the ambulance service can prevent the need for an ED visit.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 19 July 2022
  2. News Article
    Ambulance services are under intense pressure, with record numbers of callouts and the most urgent, category-one, calls last month. BBC Two's Newsnight programme spent from 08:00 to 20:00 on Monday at six hospitals with the longest delays handing patients over from paramedics to accident and emergency staff. This should take 15 minutes or less - but crews often wait many hours and sometimes whole 12-hour shifts, with ambulances queuing outside unable to respond to other emergency calls. At Royal Cornwall, 25 ambulances were queuing by the afternoon, three for at least 10-and-a-half hours, at Derriford, in Plymouth, 20 were queuing up to 11 hours in an overflow car park and the longest wait at Heartlands was more than five hours. "We're right on the fringe of collapse right now," a paramedic who has worked in emergency care for more than a decade said. "People are phoning and being told that they're not going to get an ambulance for six or nine hours. And that's happening routinely - that is happening pretty much every shift." "It would be wrong to say that there are times when I haven't shed a tear... for the people we haven't been able to help because it's been too late," the paramedic said. "They may have died anyway but there are definitely cases that I've been to where we should have been to them sooner and less harm would have come to them." Read full story Source: BBC News, 15 July 2022
  3. News Article
    Hundreds of children suffering from mental health issues are attending A&E each day, with some waiting up to five days in emergency departments, The Independent can reveal. Internal NHS data leaked to The Independent, shows the number of young patients waiting more than 12 hours from arrival has also more than doubled in the last year. A national survey of senior A&E doctors by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) found in some areas children’s mental health services have worsened in the last three years, while the majority of respondents warned there were no children’s crisis services open after 5pm. One NHS trust chief executive has warned his hospital’s A&Es have seen a “real surge” in both attendances of people with severe mental health issues and a sharp increase in long waits in recent months. One parent, Lee Pickwell, told The Independent his daughter was admitted to paediatric wards several times and stayed days in an emergency “section 136” unit while she waited more than two months for a mental health bed. Dr Mark Buchanan, RCEM’s lead for children’s mental health, told The Independent that despite improvements, children’s mental health services still fall short of what is needed. Dr Buchanan said: “I’ve seen children who have been not seen by Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), who been refused the referrals, despite the fact that the mum and dad were taking it in turns to sleep outside their bedroom door because they were scared that they’d run away and do some harm.” Read full story Source: The Independent, 13 July 2022
  4. News Article
    An ambulance trust lost 1,700 hours of working time in one week in April due to vehicles waiting outside a hospital. The BBC has discovered that the figure was reached twice during April as ambulance crews waited outside Gloucestershire Royal Hospital in Gloucester to handover patients. That equates to about 70 days worth of waiting time each week. The trust that runs the hospital said it was facing "significant challenges" as it dealt with "unrelenting demand". Figures show that since the end of January, South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) has lost a minimum of 800 hours of working time each week due to ambulances having to wait outside Gloucestershire Royal Hospital, unable to get patients into A&E. The national target for transferring patients from ambulances in to A&E is 15 minutes, but in some cases people had to wait up to 10 hours in ambulance queues in Gloucester. Read full story Source: BBC News, 12 July 2022
  5. News Article
    Steve Barclay has been named as the new health secretary following the resignation of Sajid Javid, who stepped down after saying he had lost faith in Boris Johnson's leadership. He starts as secretary of state at a time when the NHS and social care in England are under serious pressure. Amanda Pritchard, the head of NHS England, has warned that the next two years could be even tougher for the health service than the two years since the start of the pandemic. NHS Providers, which represents hospitals and other NHS trusts, described the problems Mr Barclay faces on his first day in the job as "big and pressing". At the very top of that list is a record backlog for planned operations. Read full story Source: BBC News, 6 July 2022
  6. News Article
    More than 10,000 people are waiting three months or longer following an urgent referral for suspected cancer, internal NHS data seen by HSJ reveals. Patients with suspected cancer are not supposed to wait more than two months from a referral. However, information shared with HSJ shows that of the 313,000 people on the national cancer waiting list, just over 10,000 had waited 104 days or more. Information about three-month cancer waits is not made public on a regular basis. NHS England publishes data for the total backlog of patients waiting over 62 days, but does not make public the regional or trust-level results, or reveal how many patients are waiting three months or more. One senior figure in cancer policy told HSJ the backlog position was “awful” and “a reflection of a worsening trajectory overwhelming diagnostic capacity in particular”. Breast, skin and lower gastro-intestinal cancers saw the biggest increases in long waiters. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 5 July 2022
  7. News Article
    Paramedics have begun looking after patients inside an A&E unit, in an initiative by the health service to stop ambulances queueing outside hospitals and ease the strain on overstretched casualty staff. The scheme has led to patients being handed over much more quickly at a hospital that was one of the worst in England for sick people being stuck, sometimes for many hours, in the back of an ambulance. Queen’s hospital in Romford, in east London, has set up an ambulance receiving centre (ARC) near its main casualty unit in which two London Ambulance Service paramedics are on duty round the clock to help look after patients who would otherwise be trapped outside or in a corridor, waiting to be seen. Patients who end up in the new six-cubicle unit behind the A&E nurses’ station have a better experience while they wait and are more comfortable – and safer – because they can have their relatives with them, eat and drink and use the toilet more easily. Almost 2,000 patients have passed through the ARC since it opened last November, saving nearly 13,000 hours of ambulance crews’ time and enabling them to respond to emergency calls more quickly. However, some A&E doctors regard the scheme as merely “a sticking plaster”, given that queues of ambulances have become common outside many hospitals and that casualty units are treating the lowest percentage of patients within four hours on record. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 July 2022
  8. News Article
    An 18-year-old woman suffering a mental health crisis was forced to wait eight-and-a-half days in A&E before getting a bed in a psychiatric hospital – believed to be the longest such wait seen in the NHS. Louise (not her real name) had to be looked after by the police and security guards and sleep in a chair and on a mattress of the floor in the A&E at St Helier hospital in Sutton, south London, because no bed was available in a mental health facility. She became increasingly “dejected, despairing and desperate” as her ordeal continued and, her mental health worsening while she waited, self-harmed by banging her head off a wall. She absconded twice because she did not know when she would finally start inpatient treatment. Louise arrived at St Helier on the evening of Thursday 16 June and did not get a bed in an NHS psychiatric unit until the early hours of Saturday 25 June, more than eight days later. She was diagnosed last year with emotionally unstable personality disorder and ADHD. The mental health charity Mind said it believed it to be the longest wait in A&E ever endured by someone experiencing a mental health crisis, and described it as “unacceptable, disgraceful and dangerous”. It called for urgent action to tackle the inadequacy of NHS mental health provision and bed numbers. “An eight-and-a-half day wait in A&E for a mental health bed is both unacceptable and disgraceful. Mind has never heard of a patient in crisis waiting this long to receive the care they need, and serious questions need to be raised as to how anyone – let alone an 18-year-old – was left to suffer for so long without the care she needs,” said Rheian Davies, the head of Mind’s legal unit. “This is dangerous for staff, who are not trained to give the acute care the patient needs, and dangerous for the patient, who needs that care immediately – not over a week later." Read full story Source: The Guardian, 4 July 2022
  9. News Article
    Elective activity levels are still significantly below those achieved before the pandemic, despite the high profile and government-led drive to recover services. HSJ has seen internal data which suggests raw elective activity levels from the start of April to mid-June have averaged around 88% of that recorded in the same period during 2019-20. This is despite the NHS aiming to deliver activity levels of at least 110% above the pre-covid benchmark in 2022-23, in its attempt to make inroads into record elective care waiting lists. According to senior and well-placed sources, the continued low activity levels have sparked discussions within NHSE about easing or resetting the expectations for the year. It had been hoped that increased activity from May onwards would start to drive down the waiting list – or at least slow its growth. However, the data obtained by HSJ suggests activity levels continue to disappoint. Sources pointed to repeated covid waves and related pressures through the spring, saying this has hampered efforts to ramp up activity. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 4 July 2022
  10. News Article
    Suffering is “the new norm” in the NHS and people can expect to spend their last few years in pain, the outgoing chairman of the British Medical Association said. Chaand Nagpaul, who steps down this week, said the NHS was in a “perilous state”. He also wants people to have sympathy for the “plight” of junior doctors, who have said they will prepare for a ballot on strikes over pay. There are 6.5 million people on NHS waiting lists, many of whom have been waiting a year or more. Nagpaul, who has been a GP for 33 years, said: “I have not come across this scale of suffering, of unmet need. And what we’re going to be seeing is people spending the last years of their lives, literally in pain, unable . . . to have a hip operation. That will be the final years of their lives.” He said there was a “whole, larger population of patients just literally not featuring in the statistics” waiting for outpatient treatment, mental health care and diabetes checks. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 27 June 2022
  11. News Article
    NHS patients in England who have been waiting more than two years for surgery are being offered hospital treatment in alternative parts of the country. More than 6,000 long-term waiting-list patients are being offered travel and accommodation costs where appropriate to help the NHS through the backlog. Health officials want to ensure nobody is waiting more than two years by the end of July. Three patients waiting for surgery in Derby have already received treatment in the Northumbria health region, with another two patients booked in, NHS England said. And in south-west London, 17 orthopaedic patients from the South West of England are being treated, with another 11 patients set to follow in the coming weeks. Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid said the number of two-year waits had already reduced by two-thirds since January. "Innovations like this are helping to tackle waiting lists and speed up access to treatment, backed by record investment," he said. But British Medical Association leader Dr Chaand Nagpaul is warning that attempts to address what he called a "once in a generation backlog of unimaginable proportions" would be undermined by a lack of staff and beds. Read full story Source: BBC News, 27 June 2022
  12. News Article
    Surgery waiting lists will triple by 2030, triggering a “population health crisis”, unless there is a huge increase in NHS capacity, according to new research. Experts from Birmingham University have said efforts to reduce hospital backlogs are not enough and that it is “impossible” for the existing frontline workers to tackle increasing waiting lists. The most in-depth analysis of the challenge facing hospital waiting lists in England has revealed 4.3 million people need invasive surgery or procedures such as endoscopy, the largest number since 2007. Of these, an estimated 3.3 million are on a “hidden waiting list”, likely to need treatment but yet to be identified by the NHS due to the impact of the pandemic. More than 2.3 million people, 53% of the waiting list, are of working age, meaning their delayed diagnoses and treatments could have an impact on the economy. Without a substantial increase in NHS capacity, the team behind the work say the total figure for those waiting for surgery in England could rise to 14.6 million by 2030. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 26 June 2022
  13. News Article
    Senior doctors have drawn up a major dossier refuting Sajid Javid’s claim that the pressures on the NHS were created by the Covid pandemic, amid continued warnings over patient safety, scarce beds and staff morale. The health secretary has repeatedly suggested that the problems around record waiting lists and ambulance waiting times have been prompted by the pandemic. Last week in parliament, he accused shadow health secretary Wes Streeting of having his “head under a rock for two years” for not seeing that the pressures stemmed from Covid. However, in a major review of evidence shared with the Observer, doctors pointed to issues around funding, bed capacity, staffing and recruitment that pre-dated the arrival of Covid. The dossier, drawn up by the British Medical Association as it gathers for its annual conference this week, finds that the UK’s health services were ill-prepared for the pandemic as a result of “historical underfunding and under-resourcing in the decade preceding the virus”. Denise Langhor, an emergency medicine consultant in the north-west of England, said that the pandemic had “laid bare” the health service’s problems, but did not create them. “Those problems and those holes already existed,” she said. “It is entirely disingenuous of this government to claim the waiting lists and the difficulties people are experiencing with NHS care at the moment are due to Covid. They have been building for a decade. “Every day, I have patients that I wish I could have treated sooner. It’s an awful thing as a doctor to be trying to look after patients on a corridor, and knowing they are not getting the standard of care that you want to give them. “Frequently it feels like we’re operating by choosing the least worst option rather than the best option.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 26 June 2022
  14. News Article
    Violence against ambulance staff in England has reached a record high, as the NHS crisis in emergency care continues to deepen. An estimated 12,626 incidents were reported in the 12 months to April 2022, according to nationwide data shared with The Independent – a 7% rise on the previous year. However, since 2016, the number of paramedics who have been verbally or physically assaulted, or threatened with assault, has nearly doubled, rising from 7,689. Adam Hopper, the national ambulance violence prevention and reduction lead for the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE), which provided the data, said the findings “confirm the worrying trend of increasing violence against ambulance staff”. One paramedic told The Independent a bone was broken in his neck after he was strangled by a drunken patient he was attempting to treat. Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, a membership body for trusts in England, said that alcohol is the most prominent factor in such assaults, followed by drugs and people being in mental health crisis. “Race and sexuality have also increased as exacerbating factors in these assaults, as have delays to treatment and arrival times,” he added. Read full story Source: The Independent, 19 June 2022
  15. News Article
    Almost 100,000 people with serious heart problems, including some “living on borrowed time”, are enduring long waits for potentially life-saving NHS care because hospitals are so busy. Some of them are in such poor health they will have a heart attack and die as a consequence of facing such “dangerous” long delays, the British Heart Foundation has warned. The number of patients in England being forced to wait more than the supposed maximum 18 weeks for cardiac treatment has trebled since Covid-19 struck, from 32,186 in February 2020 to an unprecedented 96,321, a BHF analysis of published NHS England data shows. They are waiting for procedures such as having a stent or balloon inserted to reopen a blocked artery, a pacemaker or implantable defibrillator fitted, or open heart surgery, including bypasses or valve replacement operations. Others urgently need to have an echocardiogram, CT or MRI scan to help doctors decide on treatment. Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, a consultant cardiologist who is also the BHF’s associate medical director, said: “Cardiac care can’t wait. Without timely treatment, heart patients may be living on borrowed time.” “Tens of thousands of people feel in limbo, waiting many months or even years for cardiac surgery, invasive heart procedures or important diagnostic tests. During this time they could quite quickly become much sicker, and tragically some could even die before they can receive the heart care they so desperately need,” she added. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 16 June 2022
  16. News Article
    Next week’s rail strikes will ’probably end up killing people’ as they will prevent staff working for already struggling ambulance trusts from getting to work, a senior NHS leader has told HSJ. Both London Ambulance Service Trust and South Central Ambulance Service Foundation Trust have moved to ”Reap 4”, This is the highest level of alert, meaning they are under extreme pressure. Ambulance trusts are already experiencing high demand amid soaring temperatures and continuing problems with lengthy handovers at the accident and emergency departments. Fears are now growing that next week’s rail strikes will push services to breaking point as many ambulance staff travel to work by public transport. The three days of rail strikes – on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday next week – will see many lines with very limited services. Tube services in London will also be hit by a strike on Tuesday and the London Overground and some tube lines will be affected on rail strike days. A senior leader closely involved in southern England’s emergency and urgent care services told HSJ: “Next week’s rail strikes will probably end up killing people because they’ll prevent ambulance trust staff getting to work.” Other ambulance trusts are understood to be monitoring the situation closely. Trusts in REAP 4 (REAP stands for resource escalation action plan) normally take a series of measures including diverting more staff to frontline duties, asking some patients to make their own way to hospital and concentrating on reaching the most serious patients. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 16 June 2022
  17. News Article
    Delays unloading ambulances at busy hospitals are causing serious harm to patients, a safety watchdog is warning. The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch has been investigating how the long waits are delaying 999 emergency response times across England. Kenneth Shadbolt, 94, waited more than five hours for an ambulance after a bad fall - an accident that proved fatal. Logs show that in his final 999 call he asked: "Can you please tell them to hurry up or I shall be dead." Ken Shadbolt had been in good shape for his age. On the night of Wednesday, 23 March 2022, just before 03:00, he got out of bed to go the bathroom and fell, hitting a wardrobe before collapsing on the floor. He had hurt his hip - how badly he didn't know - and couldn't get up. He could reach his mobile on his bedside, though, and dialled 999 for help. The BBC has seen transcripts of the three separate phone calls he made to South Western Ambulance Service that night. The first was short and factual, covering the basic details of his injury. He seemed calm and lucid but made clear he was in pain and needed an ambulance. Internal call logs seen by the BBC show that at this point Ken was triaged as a category two emergency, meaning paramedics should arrive in 18 minutes, on average. About 15 minutes later, Ken called 999 for a second time. An internal ambulance service log seen by the BBC shows that South Western Ambulance Service was indeed busy that night. It talks about "high demand" in the Gloucester area, with more than 60 patients waiting for help, some for more than eight hours. Another hour passed before Ken made his third and final call to 999. It was clear now that he was in serious pain. He felt "terrible sick" and said his "breathing is going too". "I need an ambulance because I'm going to fade away quite quickly," he said. The same reply came back: "The ambulance service is just under a lot of pressure at the moment... we are doing our best." An ambulance finally got to Kenneth Shadbolt's house at 08:10 that morning, four hours after that final call. Ken died at 14:21 that afternoon, with the cause of death given as a "very large subdural haematoma" or bleed on the brain. His son Jerry Shadbolt said: "The doctors were saying his injuries were non-survivable but would they have been non-survivable if he'd arrived at hospital four hours earlier? I'd like an answer to that question. "He was on his own and he knew he was on his own. He must have felt abandoned and alone on his bedroom floor. That's the most troubling part of it for me." Read full story Source: BBC News, 16 June 2022
  18. News Article
    The NHS has a low bed base, and NHS England is reviewing ‘how we right-size our capacity’ across hospital, community and ‘virtual’ services, Amanda Pritchard has said. The NHSE chief executive addressed the annual NHS Confederation this week and said: “The NHS has long had one of the lowest bed bases among comparable health systems. And in many respects this reflects on our efficiency and our drives to deliver better care in the community. “But it was true before the pandemic, and it remains true now that we have passed the point at which that efficiency actually becomes inefficient. “So the point has come where we need to review how we right-size our capacity across the NHS. That will of course look at the whole picture of hospital, community and virtual capacity.” Ms Pritchard also highlighted the current pressures on the emergency care system, which has widely been linked to slow discharges from hospital and insufficient social care provision. She cited the “unacceptable rise in 12-hour waits for admission from [accident and emergency]” which “underlines that the issue is flow”, and said “we know we will need to make more progress before winter”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 June 2022
  19. News Article
    One of the trusts worst affected by coronavirus has been issued with two warning notices and rated ‘inadequate’ for leadership, following a Care Quality Commission inspection. The regulator raised serious concerns about the safety of Countess of Chester Hospital Foundation Trust’s maternity services, as well as the oversight and learning from incidents. It also found staff were experiencing multiple problems with a newly installed electronic patient record, while systems for managing the elective waiting list were said to be unsuitable. In maternity services, the inspectors flagged severe staff shortages and a failure to properly investigate safety incidents. They said there were three occasions during the inspections when the antenatal and post-natal ward was served by only one midwife, despite the interim head of midwifery saying this would never happen. Inspectors also highlighted five incidents last year where women had suffered a major post-partum haemorrhage, involving the loss of more than two litres of blood and which resulted in an unplanned hysterectomy. The CQC said two were not reported as serious incidents, and where learning had been identified from the others, action plans were not being completed on time. The CQC said it was only made aware of the incidents by a whistleblower, while internal actions agreed in December 2021 had still not been implemented two months later. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 June 2022
  20. News Article
    The chief executive of one of the first teaching trusts in the country to have eliminated two-year waiters for elective care has said there is ‘no magic to it’ and it can be replicated elsewhere. Since the beginning of April, University Hospitals of Coventry and Warwickshire Trust has reported zero patients waiting over two years for their elective treatment – ahead of NHS England’s target of July 2022. According to the latest data, there are now 42 trusts that have eliminated 104-week waits and UHCW is the largest trust to have done this. UHCW chief executive Andy Hardy said that in order to achieve this the trust had been “relentless” in its focus on waiting times and had set up “bootcamps” to help managers understand how referral to treatment works. Mr Hardy said in an interview with HSJ: “It really does come down to a laser-like focus on waiting times, both at an executive level, down to a group level, and down to speciality level. It can be replicated. There’s no magic to it.” He said: “We use data to drive our organisations away from bad decisions and I have a weekly access meeting with the chief operating officer to look at where we are against all access targets, but obviously we focus on waiting times." Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 15 June 2022
  21. News Article
    More than 380,000 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E last year, new figures show, amid claims ‘misleading’ public data masks the true scale of the problem. A Royal College of Emergency Medicine report shows 381,991 people across 74 NHS trusts waited half a day or longer from the time they arrived at hospital in 2021. The figures are 14 times higher than the official numbers published by the NHS – which say 25,553 people waited more than 12 hours during the same period at the same trusts – due to the different ways waiting times are measured. While NHS England publishes data every month, it only shows how long patients have waited after a decision by doctors to admit them. Experts claim this is misleading and have called for the NHS to publish the figures from point of arrival instead. It comes after The Independent revealed leaked data in May, showing that more than 3,000 patients a day were regularly facing 12-hour waits in the first four months of 2022. Dr Adrian Boyle, RCEM vice president, said the new figures were “staggering” and “make clear that measuring 12-hour waits from decision to admit masks the reality facing patients and staff. Read full story Source: The Independent, 14 June 2022
  22. News Article
    NHS patients are being put in danger and waiting lists are getting even longer due to a £9bn maintenance backlog and a major lack of capital funding that has left some parts of hospitals “extremely dilapidated” and unfit for patients, health leaders have warned. Boris Johnson promised in 2019 to “build and fund 40 new hospitals”. But the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), the government watchdog, later gave the project an “amber/red” ranking, meaning its delivery “is in doubt with major risks or issues apparent in a number of key areas”. At the same time, the NHS in England is facing a £9bn maintenance backlog. Half of that sum, which is up from £6.5bn just three years ago, is required to tackle failings classed as posing either a “high” or “significant” risk to patients and staff. Now health leaders are warning that without an urgent injection of capital funding, patient safety is at risk and the waiting list for care – worsened by the pandemic – “will grow even larger”. Speaking to the Guardian, Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents the whole healthcare system in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, said the crisis had become extremely serious. Patient safety as well as the ability of the NHS to tackle record waiting lists is being “severely hampered”, Taylor warned, because the UK has been “plagued” by one of the worst records for capital investment in healthcare across all OECD countries over the past decade. One NHS trust chair in London told a survey, carried out this month, that “cramped” space means the trust is not “building up our capacity to deal with waiting lists”, and conditions for patients in some wards were “not fit for purpose”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 14 June 2022
  23. News Article
    The NHS needs reform rather than more money, the health secretary has said, while admitting that record-high waiting lists will continue to rise before they fall. Sajid Javid said the health service already had the resources it needed and did not require more to care for patients effectively. “The NHS now has locked in the resources it needs. It doesn’t need any more money. What it needs to deliver for more people is not money. It needs reform,” he said. In an interview with the Times, he compared the NHS to the now defunct video rental chain Blockbuster, arguing that it needed to be dramatically restructured in order to continue delivering healthcare free at the point of use. “You want to have a system that, yes, it’s got the values of 1948 but looking at delivery towards 2048,” he said. The health secretary’s remarks on funding for the health service follow a damning report that showed the NHS had lost almost 25,000 beds across the UK in the last decade. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said the drop had led to a sharp increase in waiting times for A&E, ambulances and operations, and was causing “real patient harm” and a “serious patient safety crisis”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 11 June 2022
  24. News Article
    Coordination of waiting lists and elective treatment across health systems and regions should be ‘far more systematic’, and could have happened earlier, chief executives of some of the hardest hit trusts have told HSJ. In interviews for the HSJ Health Check podcast, the CEOs of King’s, Croydon, Chester and Sandwell and West Birmingham hospital trusts spoke about their experience in the pandemic and what could be learned from it. These included the need for faster decision making; resources for deprived and diverse areas, which are often hardest hit; the need for basic staff facilities such as parking and eating areas for staff; longer-term attention to the wellbeing of staff who were most affected; and to give time for trusts to recover. On elective care, the CEOs highlighted how the length of lists and waits, and the NHS’s ability to keep up, are now much worse in some areas than others. Some of those with the longest waits and lists at present – such as Countess of Chester and Birmingham – were also heavily hit by Covid; for others this is not the case. There were moves, particularly later in the pandemic, for patients who were on the elective waiting list of one trust to be treated at another, for example if they needed urgent treatment and faced harm if delayed, while other hospitals were still able to treat less urgent cases. Combining lists, often known as “shared patient tracking (or treatment) lists”, could also mean capacity being managed more efficiently across providers. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 10 June 2022 .
  25. News Article
    Women, low earners and ethnic minorities are faring worse on NHS waiting lists, according to research. Healthwatch, a patient watchdog, warned there was a risk that those with “more demands on their lives” such as long hours or caring responsibilities could end up at the back of the queue. It urged hospitals to be proactive in managing waiting lists and communicate with patients who might otherwise be left in limbo. The Healthwatch survey found 54% of women had waited more than four months for treatment, compared with 42% of men. They were also more likely to have had treatment delayed or cancelled, and to feel that a delay to treatment had made an impact on their ability to work. Some 54% of people on lower incomes had been waiting more than four months for hospital care, compared with 34% of higher wealth individuals. They reported a greater impact on their mental health and their ability to work. And 57% of respondents from ethnic minorities had faced a delay to or cancellation of hospital treatment, compared with 42 per cent of white British people. Louise Ansari, Healthwatch England’s national director, said the factors could have a “layering effect” that meant people had a much poorer experience, calling for “an additional specific focus on those groups” so that they do not end up “in worse and worse health”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 8 June 2022
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