Search the hub
Showing results for tags 'Long waiting list'.
Found 800 results
-
News Article
Trust insists ‘our data is correct’ despite waiting list ‘grip’ concerns
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
An external review of waiting list management at a large acute trust has found several serious problems – including ‘pop-up’ patients and thousands of cancelled appointments each week – but concluded they were no worse than would be found at ‘most NHS trusts’. The review appears to have been triggered after University Hospitals of the North Midlands declared unexpected increases in the number of 78-week and 104-week waiters earlier this year, while the government and NHS England have been intensively performance managing these measures. The independent report by independent consultant Wendy Baines states: “The review found no evidence of deliberate irregularities in the management of waiting times. “Although as the case for most NHS trusts, the capacity to misrepresent the ‘true’ volume of waiters at a certain point in time is significant. “Managing this risk by minimising the capacity for errors through training, the right pathway administration systems and tools, and the ability to monitor data quality through a defined set of process assurance measures is key. Whilst UHNM possesses these components, they are not necessarily working in cohesion to provide the assurance and oversight needed to manage patient waiting times.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 13 June 2023 -
News Article
Three-day strike by doctors in England expected to have ‘enormous impact’
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Almost all routine NHS care in England will be disrupted for three days this week when junior doctors strike in their latest attempt to force ministers to increase their pay. Prof Stephen Powis, NHS England’s national medical director, said the stoppage would have an enormous impact and lead to huge numbers of patients missing out on planned care. Many thousands of junior doctors are due to stage a 72-hour walkout starting at 7am on Wednesday and continuing until 7am on Saturday. “The NHS has been preparing extensively for this next set of strikes,” said Powis. “But we know that – with the sheer number of appointments that need to be rescheduled – it will have an enormous impact on routine care for patients and on the waiting list, as procedures can take time to rearrange with multiple teams involved.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 13 June 2023 -
News Article
Hitting elective target ‘not in NHS’s control’, Sunak warned
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS Confederation chief says he will this week demand clarity about Rishi Sunak’s flagship waiting list reduction target, warning it may not be ‘the most sensible target [or] within the service’s control’. Matthew Taylor also reflected in an exclusive interview with HSJ about a “pretty bruising” recent planning round for 2023-24. Speaking ahead of the conference, which starts this week, he said he would ask Steve Barclay for “clarity” about “what exactly the government means when it talks about reducing waiting lists”. The prime minister’s waiting list pledge is one of his frequently-referenced five priorities, which when he set them out in January stated: “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.” But Mr Taylor said yesterday: “It’s a bit unclear to me… Does it mean the overall waiting list? Does it mean long waiters? And what about the other waiting lists that we don’t talk about [like psychiatric care for children]?” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 13 June 2023 -
News ArticleHealth leaders have blamed staff shortages for waiting lists reaching another record high, with 7.4 million people in England waiting to start treatment as of the end of April. One NHS leader said the figures showed that unsustainable “pressure continues to pile on an overstretched NHS”, and urged the government to speed up publication of its long-awaited workforce plan, which has been repeatedly postponed. Waiting list figures in England have crept up again after showing signs of improvement in recent months, despite Rishi Sunak citing bringing numbers down as one of the government’s top five priorities for 2023. Downing Street on Thursday insisted the NHS was “continuing to make progress to ensure patients are seen more quickly”, pointing to record numbers of doctors and nurses in the NHS. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 8 June 2023
-
News Article
NHS struggling to provide safe cancer care, say senior doctors
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The Royal College of Radiologists is warning that all four UK nations are facing "chronic staff shortages", with cancer patients waiting too long for vital tests and treatments. Half of all cancer units are now reporting frequent delays for both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Ministers say a workforce strategy for the NHS in England is due shortly. The plan, which is meant to spell out how the government will plug staffing gaps over the next 15 years, has been repeatedly delayed, to the frustration of some in the health service. In June 2022, Carol Fletcher, from South Wales, finally had her routine screening appointment for breast cancer, which was itself overdue. "It took another eight weeks after my mammogram before I was told there might be something wrong," she said. Since her cancer diagnosis, there have been more waits - for scans, tests, surgery and then chemo. "I was told that I might not get results back [quickly] after my mastectomy because they haven't got enough pathologists, so there was another eight-week delay for chemotherapy," she said. "I can't plan for the future and it's had a huge impact on my family." Read full story Source: BBC News, 8 June 2023 -
News ArticleOne in five cases in which patients attend A&E needing mental healthcare are spending more than 12 hours in the department – at least double the rate of patients with physical health problems. Unpublished internal NHS data seen by HSJ also suggests the proportion of mental health patients suffering long waits in accident and emergency has almost tripled when compared to the situation before the pandemic. According to the data, the proportion of attendances by patients with a mental health problem who waited more than 12 hours in A&E before being admitted or discharged increased from 7% (34,945 breaches) in 2019-20 to 20% (88,250 breaches) in 2022-23. The situation has become so difficult, that some acute trusts are spot purchasing private sector mental health in order to discharge patients. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 5 June 2023
-
News Article
Error causes 800 patients to be wrongly removed from waiting list
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A trust is carrying out a review after hundreds of patients were wrongly removed from the waiting list and potentially missed out on treatment. York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals Foundation Trust told HSJ that roughly 800 patients of its referral to treatment waiting list, were affected. A serious incident was declared after it emerged some patients “had their referral to treat clocks stopped erroneously, resulting in patients not receiving treatment”, according to a report to the trust board. The trust said reviews were under way but had not yet identified any cases of “moderate or significant clinical harm”, although it admitted some patients had been significantly delayed. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 2 June 2023 -
News Article
Almost 780,000 on NHS Scotland waiting lists
Patient-Safety-Learning posted a news article in News
Almost 780,000 Scots found themselves on an NHS waiting list for an appointment, treatment, or test, new figures show. Statistics published on Tuesday by Public Health Scotland show a rise in the number of people waiting, from 772,887 on December 31 to 779,533 as of March 31. Some 479,725 people were waiting for an outpatient appointment on March 31, an increase of 0.5% (2,617) from December 31 and 14.5% higher than the same date last year. Since March 2020 – the beginning of lockdowns in response to the pandemic in the UK – the waiting list has grown by 87%. A Scottish Government target aims to ensure 95% of patients are seen within 12 weeks. Of those waits, 31,498 people had been waiting longer than 1 year for their procedure, the figures show. Humza Yousaf, Scotland's First Minister said: "There’s going to be a long way to go. The recovery plan is purposely a 5-year recovery plan because we know that recovery from the pandemic—which was the biggest shock the NHS faced for almost 75 years—is going to take us not weeks or months, but years to recover from." Read full story Source: Medscape, 31 May 2023 -
News Article
'Appalling' gynaecology waiting times in NI under rapid review
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Waiting times for gynaecology services in Northern Ireland are so bad that an independent and rapid review is taking place, BBC News NI has learned. It is being conducted by the Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) programme which helps improve the quality of care within the NHS. A GIRFT team spent a week this month visiting all five health and social care trusts. In October 2022, 36,900 women in NI were on a gynaecology waiting list. A report from the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said that figure was a 42% increase since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and that Northern Ireland had the longest gynaecological waiting lists in the UK. While waiting lists show that some women are waiting about 110 weeks to see a consultant gynaecologist for the first time, consultants have told BBC News NI that the reality is women depending on their medical issue are waiting much longer. Read full story Source: 31 May 2023 -
News ArticlePatients are being urged to shop around on the NHS app and website to cut their waiting time for treatment in England. IT systems have been updated to allow patients to more easily exercise their right to choose where they go for planned care, such as knee operations. They will now be able to view up to five providers - filtered by distance, waiting times and quality of care. But hospitals warned staffing shortages still needed to be tackled to make the biggest impact on waits. The idea of choosing where to go for treatment has been in place since the early 2000s, but few use it. Currently only1 in 10 exercises their right to choose, with patients reporting they are not always offered a choice of where to go or that it is hard to select different venues. Ministers believe that by searching the list of different hospitals, patients will be able to reduce their waits - potentially by up to three months, research suggests. Read full story Source: BBC News, 25 May 2023
-
News Article
Northern Ireland: No shows to health appointments costing thousands
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Patients who fail to turn up for surgical day case procedures are costing the health service thousands of pounds. It is a problem across Northern Ireland's five health trusts. Over a 10-month period in the South Eastern area 14,000 patients did not attend or cancelled review appointments on the day they were due to turn up. Assistant Director of Elective Surgery at the South Eastern Trust Christine Allam said it was "frustrating". The South Eastern trust review showed between April 2022 and January 2023, 7,755 people did not attend or cancelled new outpatient appointments on the day. During the same period, 14,003 or 10% of patients didn't show for review appointments. Ms Allam said the situation was "frustrating for those patients who are waiting to be seen". "Those slots where people don't turn up are lost capacity because we haven't been given notice - and this only lengthens the waiting lists," she added. It is a problem that all health trusts are experiencing. Read full story Source: BBC News, 24 May 2023 -
News Article
People paying for operations up by third since Covid pandemic
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The number of people paying privately for operations and treatments in the UK has risen by more than a third since the pandemic started, the latest figures from the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) show. Last year 272,000 used their own money to pay for treatments, such as knee or eye surgery - up from 199,000 in 2019. The NHS backlog has been blamed for the trend, with some of the treatments costing more than £15,000. But there does appear to have been a shift away from private insurance driven by the cost of living crisis. The numbers treated through that route were just below 550,000 - more than 30,000 fewer than three years ago. Health providers are reporting patients desperate for treatment because of NHS waits are increasingly turning to the private market. Read full story Source: BBC News, 24 May 2023 -
News Article
Woman died on floor after waiting over five hours for ambulance in Wales
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
A 58-year-old woman died alone curled up in a blanket on the floor of her bedroom as she waited more than five hours for an ambulance. Relatives of Rachel Rose Gibson believe she had a heart attack at her home in Wrexham, north Wales, only a short drive away from a hospital, but died before an ambulance reached her. The Welsh ambulance service said that on the day Gibson died, its crews spent more than 700 hours waiting outside hospitals for patients to be admitted, which meant they could not respond quickly to people needing help. Family members said Gibson, a grandmother of seven, called an ambulance at 4pm on 5 April as she was coughing up blood and in chronic pain. By the time an ambulance arrived at 9.30pm, she had died. Her daughter, Nikita, 29, said: “She was lying on the floor curled up in a blanket. It haunts me to know she died alone in so much pain. “I feel like I can’t fully grieve because I’m so angry. She only lives five minutes away from the hospital, but must have been in too much pain to get into a taxi.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 22 May 2023 -
News ArticleAbout 23,000 people died in accident and emergency departments last year, according to an estimate by Labour based on Freedom of Information requests to every NHS trust in England. Half of the trusts responded to the party’s requests and, based on that information, it calculated that just over 23,000 people had died – an increase of more than 20% on 2021, and nearly 40% on 2020. The increase in deaths corresponds with a sharp rise in NHS waiting times, as hospitals struggle with high demand and a lack of resources after the Covid-19 pandemic. Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said: “People turning to the NHS in an emergency should know they will be seen and treated before it’s too late. The Conservatives’ failure over 13 years to properly staff or reform the NHS has a cost in lives.” Maria Caulfield, the health minister, defended the government’s record, however, saying: “We are delivering a record number of tests, speeding up discharge from hospitals, and cutting waiting lists as we also work to halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, and stop the boats.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 19 May 2023
-
News Article
Use private sector more for NHS patients, says Labour
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The government in England should increase its use of the private sector to tackle the NHS backlog, Labour says. It said as many as 300,000 patients have missed out on treatment since it called for greater use of private clinics in January 2022. And the party said it was unjust that the lack of action meant only those who could afford to pay for treatment themselves were being seen on time. The government said it was delivering by cutting long waits. However, data published by NHS England last week showed key targets to tackle the backlogs in cancer care and routine treatment had been missed. Overall, there are now a record 7.3 million people on a hospital waiting list, which is nearly three million higher than it was before the pandemic started. Read full story Source: BBC News, 19 May 2023 -
News Article
‘Pathetic and dishonest’: trust’s deputy CEO blasts NHSE approach to cancer
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
NHS England’s approach to recovering cancer services has been described as ‘pathetic and dishonest’ by the deputy chief executive of a major trust. Andy Welch, deputy chief executive and medical director of Newcastle Hospitals Foundation Trust, has publicly criticised comments made in November by NHSE’s national cancer director Dame Cally Palmer, who said “we have our foot on the gas” towards reaching cancer waiting time targets. Mr Welch is an outspoken figure who has also slammed NHSE for “destroying” the morale of midwives through its “failed ‘continuity of care’ concept”, and described the potential “toppling” of the government as “brilliant” within the last three weeks alone. The Newcastle medic is the chair of the Northern Cancer Alliance. His criticism of Dame Cally comes as performance against the flagship cancer target remains largely unchanged since last year. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 May 2023 -
News ArticleFactors like deprivation should be considered in prioritising waiting lists, NHS England’s inequalities director has said, but in a ‘very sophisticated, thoughtful way’ alongside clinical need and waiting times. NHSE said in summer 2020 the service would “restore services inclusively”, and some systems and trusts have developed tools they say could allow them to consider factors such as deprivation, race, employment, and lifestyle risk factors, such as smoking. But the issue has been controversial. Research for University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire Trust, which has developed a new prioritisation system, found many members of the public are opposed to taking these factors into account. NHSE standard contract guidance for 2023-24, seemingly cautioning against such moves, said: “[The Department of Health and Social Care] asked us to make clear that providers are ‘recommended to prioritise waiting lists according to clinical need and then in chronological order from the longest waiting patient.’” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 18 May 2023
-
News ArticleHospitals are failing to tackle spiralling children's surgery waiting lists as the backlog hits more than 400,000 for the first time. Leaked documents show children’s waiting lists for both inpatient and outpatient care are “increasing at double the rate of adults” and, despite efforts, services have failed to catch up after they were paused during the pandemic. NHS leaders have repeatedly raised concerns about the backlog amid warnings that services for young people have been “deprioritised” to cut adult lists. One NHS leader warned that the long waits would be likely to affect some children’s “ability to lead full and active lives” and worsen existing inequalities between adult and children’s care. Read full story Source: The Independent, 11 May 2023
-
News Article
Waiting list hits new record high as attention shifts to 65-week breaches
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
The NHS waiting list hit a record 7.3 million incomplete pathways in March, according to new official data, as trust bosses gear up to clear the circa 95,000 patients who have waited over 65 weeks. NHS England also confirmed in its monthly statistical update that there remained around 10,000 patients on the waiting list who had breached 78 weeks despite a target to clear this cohort by April, as HSJ revealed would be the case in March. It instead hoped these will be cleared by June or July. Ten trusts are responsible for around half of the 78-week breaches, with Manchester University Foundation Trust recording the most on 969, University Hospitals Leicester Trust reporting 837 and Royal Devon University Healthcare FT on 695. NHSE chief executive Amanda Pritchard said the NHS “is making great strides on long waits… in the face of incredible pressure [and this] is testimony to the hard work, drive and innovation of frontline colleagues”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 11 May 2023 -
News ArticleA key government pledge to reduce the size of the NHS’s record-breaking care backlog has been broken, the health secretary has admitted. Steve Barclay slipped out the news in a Commons statement on Tuesday about a totally unrelated area of NHS policy – his new plan to improve access to GP care. He disclosed to MPs that the NHS in England had missed its target to ensure that all patients who had been waiting 18 months for an operation in hospital would be treated by April. It is thought that about 10,000 people who had been waiting for at least 78 weeks were still languishing on the 7.2 million-strong waiting list at the end of April. The failure to eradicate 18-month waits for care is embarrassing for Rishi Sunak, who made “cut waiting lists” one of his five key pledges and insisted as recently as January that the promise, which NHS England and the then health secretary Sajid Javid first made in the elective surgery recovery plan last year, would be honoured. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 9 May 2023
-
News Article
Patients getting sicker as they face long waits for NHS care, says top GP
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Patients are developing cancers and enduring so much pain that they cannot climb stairs because of the 7.2 million-strong waiting list for NHS scans and treatment, Britain’s top GP has said. Prof Kamila Hawthorne, the chair of the Royal College of GPs, said the record delays for care and the uncertainty for patients about when they would finally be seen was leaving people feeling “helpless and forgotten”. These included people with heart problems, those awaiting a hip or knee replacement, and people with potential signs of cancer whom GPs have said need to be seen urgently, she said. In an interview with the Guardian, she voiced serious concern that some of these patients saw their health deteriorate as a direct result of the delay in accessing hospital care. “Patients getting sicker while they are on the waiting list is something GPs see and worry about, because the risk to the patient is so much greater. It’s inevitable that some people stuck will get sicker, because that’s the nature of illness,” she said. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 7 May 2023 -
News Article
Scandal of mentally ill children dumped on the wrong hospital wards
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Thousands of children in mental health crisis are being treated on inappropriate general wards – with some forced to stay for more than a year and staff not properly trained to care for them, shocking new data reveals. New figures uncovered by The Independent show at least 2,838 children needing mental health care were admitted to non-psychiatric hospitals last year as the NHS battled with a lack of specialist staff and a surge in patients. Children with eating disorders – who often need to be restrained to be fed through tubes – are among those being routinely put on general wards. It means staff without any specialist training, including security guards, are sometimes left to restrain these young patients. One trust chief nurse told The Independent that porters had to be trained to restrain children on paediatric wards, causing trauma for both patients and staff. Dr Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said she was “deeply concerned” about the situation. “We now find ourselves in a situation where children and young people who have an eating disorder or mental ill health, and who may be on long waiting lists for treatment, are increasingly ending up in emergency settings and then being treated on general paediatric wards. This simply isn’t good enough,” she said. Read full story Source: The Independent, 1 May 2023 -
News Article
Who is being hit hardest by the NHS' waiting list of 7 million people?
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
Seven million people in England are currently waiting for treatment on the NHS. That's more than the entire populations of some countries, including Denmark and New Zealand. Just under half of those referred to a specialist will have been in the queue for longer than 18 weeks — the maximum target set in 2004 by the Government. And more than 360,000 of them will have been waiting a year or more. It's a deeply troubling state of affairs that has been thrown into sharp focus by the impact of the junior doctors' strike. However, 'treatment delays existed long before the doctors' strike — and also the Covid-19 pandemic,' Danielle Jefferies, a senior analyst with independent think-tank The King's Fund, told Good Health. Indeed, while the impact of the virus may have worsened the bottlenecks, the problem of rising patient demand is of longer standing. And the potential consequences are terrifying. Studies show that for each month patients with breast, bowel or head and neck cancers have their treatment delayed, the chances of them dying from the disease increase by 6 to 13%. Meanwhile, eye specialists fear some people may suffer permanent sight loss because they cannot get to a specialist in time to prevent the worsening of serious conditions such as glaucoma, which affects around 700,000 people in Britain. Read full story Source: MailOnline, 19 April 2023 -
News ArticleChronically ill patients across the UK allege they've had to go without vital medication amid delays by a private company contracted by the NHS to deliver drugs. In the last year alone, Sciensus was awarded NHS contracts worth more than £5 million, despite being placed into special measures by health regulators in 2021 following widespread delivery failings. ITV News has revealed that the CQC is currently reviewing whether to take further regulatory action against Sciensus, having been made aware of concerns about the company’s performance. The company, which is based in Burton-on-Trent and says it "works with every NHS Trust in the country", should provide a lifeline for those who rely on specialised medications. These include those with long-term conditions - like cancer, HIV, and haemophilia - which often require drugs that can't be collected from high street or hospital pharmacies. One new mother with rheumatoid arthritis said she was taken to A&E after Sciensus left her without medication for three weeks. The 37-year-old, who wishes to remain anonymous, told ITV News: "I was unable walk with a small baby... it was such a chronic flare that I couldn't walk, which I've never, ever had before in my life." Read full story Source: ITV News, 21 April 2023
-
News Article
NHS plans new elective target after April deadline missed
Patient Safety Learning posted a news article in News
System leaders are discussing pushing back the NHS’s target to virtually eliminate 78-week breaches from the waiting list by this month to ‘June or July’, HSJ understands. The discussions come after the service missed its original targeted trajectory of clearing the backlog by this month, as first proposed in NHS England’s elective recovery plan last February, despite a steep reduction over the past 18 months. Internal NHS forecasts suggest there will be around just over 10,000 long waiters still on the waiting list by the end of April, as HSJ first revealed last month. Senior sources said this week that this figure remained a likely position for the end of the month. HSJ understands there has not been any official communication to trusts about pushing back the 78-week target, and it was not yet clear when the centre’s expectations would be finalised. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 21 April 2023
