Jump to content

Search the hub

Showing results for tags 'Long waiting list'.

More search options

  • Search By Tags

    Start to type the tag you want to use, then select from the list.

  • Search By Author

Content Type


Forums

  • All
    • Commissioning, service provision and innovation in health and care
    • Coronavirus (COVID-19)
    • Culture
    • Improving patient safety
    • Investigations, risk management and legal issues
    • Leadership for patient safety
    • Organisations linked to patient safety (UK and beyond)
    • Patient engagement
    • Patient safety in health and care
    • Patient Safety Learning
    • Professionalising patient safety
    • Research, data and insight
    • Miscellaneous

Categories

  • Commissioning, service provision and innovation in health and care
    • Commissioning and funding patient safety
    • Digital health and care service provision
    • Health records and plans
    • Innovation programmes in health and care
    • Climate change/sustainability
  • Coronavirus (COVID-19)
    • Blogs
    • Data, research and statistics
    • Frontline insights during the pandemic
    • Good practice and useful resources
    • Guidance
    • Mental health
    • Exit strategies
    • Patient recovery
    • Questions around Government governance
  • Culture
    • Bullying and fear
    • Good practice
    • Occupational health and safety
    • Safety culture programmes
    • Second victim
    • Speak Up Guardians
    • Staff safety
    • Whistle blowing
  • Improving patient safety
    • Clinical governance and audits
    • Design for safety
    • Disasters averted/near misses
    • Equipment and facilities
    • Error traps
    • Health inequalities
    • Human factors (improving human performance in care delivery)
    • Improving systems of care
    • Implementation of improvements
    • International development and humanitarian
    • Safety stories
    • Stories from the front line
    • Workforce and resources
  • Investigations, risk management and legal issues
    • Investigations and complaints
    • Risk management and legal issues
  • Leadership for patient safety
    • Business case for patient safety
    • Boards
    • Clinical leadership
    • Exec teams
    • Inquiries
    • International reports
    • National/Governmental
    • Patient Safety Commissioner
    • Quality and safety reports
    • Techniques
    • Other
  • Organisations linked to patient safety (UK and beyond)
    • Government and ALB direction and guidance
    • International patient safety
    • Regulators and their regulations
  • Patient engagement
    • Consent and privacy
    • Harmed care patient pathways/post-incident pathways
    • How to engage for patient safety
    • Keeping patients safe
    • Patient-centred care
    • Patient Safety Partners
    • Patient stories
  • Patient safety in health and care
    • Care settings
    • Conditions
    • Diagnosis
    • High risk areas
    • Learning disabilities
    • Medication
    • Mental health
    • Men's health
    • Patient management
    • Social care
    • Transitions of care
    • Women's health
  • Patient Safety Learning
    • Patient Safety Learning campaigns
    • Patient Safety Learning documents
    • Patient Safety Standards
    • 2-minute Tuesdays
    • Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference 2019
    • Patient Safety Learning Annual Conference 2018
    • Patient Safety Learning Awards 2019
    • Patient Safety Learning Interviews
    • Patient Safety Learning webinars
  • Professionalising patient safety
    • Accreditation for patient safety
    • Competency framework
    • Medical students
    • Patient safety standards
    • Training & education
  • Research, data and insight
    • Data and insight
    • Research
  • Miscellaneous

News

  • News

Categories

  • Files

Calendars

  • Community Calendar

Find results in...

Find results that contain...


Date Created

  • Start
    End

Last updated

  • Start
    End

Filter by number of...

Joined

  • Start

    End

Group

First name

Last name

Country

Join a private group (if appropriate)

About me

Organisation

Role

Found 799 results
  1. News Article
    Nearly five million patients each month in England wait more than a fortnight for a GP appointment, NHS figures show, which Labour is calling "unacceptable". The government says it expects all patients needing a GP appointment to be seen within two weeks. The Royal College of GPs says 85% of appointments happen within two weeks and nearly half on the same day. Those taking longer than two weeks may be routine ones for which the wait is therefore appropriate, it says. Prof Kamila Hawthorne, who chairs the Royal College of GPs, said: "GPs and our teams are working tirelessly to deliver safe, timely and appropriate care and to give patients the choice of appointment they want. "We share our patients' frustration when they struggle to access our care. However, this is not down to GPs and their hard-working teams, but due to decades of underfunding and poor resource planning." Read full story Source: BBC News, 21 April 2023
  2. News Article
    NHS trusts have been given targets to increase elective activity that range from 103% of pre-pandemic levels to nearly 130%, internal data seen by HSJ reveals. The wide gap between the targets, which are based on past performance and reflect the value of activity carried out, indicate the slow pace of recovery at many trusts last year. Forty trusts have been set the least ambitious target, to deliver 103% of pre-covid activity levels in 2023-24, including Leeds Teaching Hospitals, Barts Health, and University Hospitals Birmingham. All providers were supposed to deliver at least 104% of pre-covid activity last year, but few managed to achieve this, with emergency pressures, the impact of covid and flu, and workforce problems hampering efforts to ramp up activity. Amanda Pritchard has previously admitted the health service would have to “re-profile” the trajectory to achieving 130% of pre-covid activity levels by 2025. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 20 April 2023
  3. News Article
    The backlog for ophthalmology appointments in England is the second-largest in the NHS, with UK eye doctors concerned about the number of patients losing sight unnecessarily. Their shock is palpable. How this could be happening in a rich country such as Britain? There are treatments for common blindness-causing conditions such as macular degeneration, but to get them patients must be able to access the service. And right now the NHS doesn’t have the capacity to deliver them in a timely way. As junior doctors’ unions – and possibly those of consultants and nurses – proceed with strike action, it’s easy to attack medical professionals with the question: “How many people are dying because of your actions?” The truth is that the entire system has been struggling, and people have been dying anyway because of system failures. Now add to this people living with disabilities that were preventable, such as going blind. When Labour was in power, it made a real effort, including with financial allocation, to reduce waiting-list times for non-emergency care. But since the Tories were elected in 2010, years of austerity and public-sector neglect – and the shifting of resources and wealthy patients into a lucrative and growing private sector – has meant that the NHS has been transformed from a robust, preventive healthcare service into an acute one. Its basic offering is now: “If you’re dying, we will save you.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 19 April 2023
  4. News Article
    Almost 200,000 hospital appointments and procedures in England were cancelled during last week’s junior doctors’ strikes, it has been revealed. There were 20,000 more appointments cancelled in the strikes that ran between 11 and 15 April than in the shorter strike in March, NHS England figures show. A total of 27,361 staff were not at work during the peak of the strikes, though the true figure could be higher as some workforce data was incomplete. The NHS’s national medical director, Prof Sir Stephen Powis, said the figures showed the “colossal impact of industrial action on planned care in the NHS”, with nearly half a million appointments rescheduled over the last five months. He said every postponed appointment had “an impact on the lives of individuals and their families and creates further pressure on services and on a tired workforce – and this is likely to be an underestimate of the impact as some areas provisionally avoided scheduling appointments for these strike days”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 17 April 2023
  5. News Article
    An all-out nurses’ strike over the May bank holiday will present “serious risks and challenges” to the NHS, a health leader has warned. Sir Julian Hartley, chief executive of NHS Providers, said the “unprecedented” strike action – which will involve staff in emergency departments, intensive care units and cancer care for the first time – was “extremely worrying”. He also said the threat of coordinated industrial action with junior doctors could result in the “most difficult challenge” for the NHS to date. Sir Julian told BBC Breakfast: “If this takes place in the way that it’s been described, then it would be the first time that we’ve seen nurses not working in those key areas, which of course would present serious risks and challenges for trusts to manage and mitigate that.” Nick Hulme, chief executive of Ipswich and Colchester hospitals, told Radio 4 the latest round of nurses’ strikes will “significantly increase the risk to patients”, adding cancer patients will face greater risks as care could be delayed. He said: “If there is a delay to cancer care, some delays won’t cause significant effects, but there are many people who have been waiting far too long for care and this will only exacerbate that risk." Read full story Source: The Independent, 16 April 2023
  6. News Article
    A quarter of a million children in the UK with mental health problems have been denied help by the NHS as it struggles to manage surging case loads against a backdrop of a crisis in child mental health. Some NHS trusts are failing to offer treatment to 60% of those referred by GPs, the research based on freedom of information request responses has found. The research carried out by the House magazine and shared with the Guardian also revealed a postcode lottery, with spending per child four times higher in some parts of the country than others, while average waits for a first appointment vary by trust from 10 days to three years. Olly Parker, head of external affairs at YoungMinds, said the freedom of information findings showed a “system is in total shutdown” with “no clear government plan to rescue it”, after the 10-year mental health plan was scrapped. “In the meantime, young people are self-harming and attempting suicide as they wait months and even years for help after being referred by doctors,” he said. “This is not children saying ‘I’m unhappy.’ They are ill, they are desperate and they need urgent help.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 16 April 2023
  7. News Article
    Around 10 per cent of the 1.2 million accident and emergency attendees in February waited 12 hours or more, newly published NHS England data has revealed, laying bare the true extent of the NHS’s emergency care crisis. The data – which NHSE has collected for years but has only now started to publish – shows 125,505 patients waited 12 hours or more from their arrival at A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged. This is more than double the highest figure under the existing metric of around 55,000, which only starts the clock from when the patient has received a decision to admit. NHSE’s decision to publish the data for 12-hour breaches from time of arrival follows a concerted campaign by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, which has long raised concerns the measure from decision to admit has significantly masked the true extent of long waits in A&E. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 13 April 2023
  8. News Article
    More than two million patients each year have to make four or more repeat visits to their GP before they get a referral, a patient watchdog has warned. Patient safety campaigners said people faced waits of “weeks, months or even years” before officially joining NHS waiting lists, and that their health and wellbeing was suffering as a result. They warned it would also add to pressure on other services such as A&E departments. Research by Healthwatch England revealed what the patient watchdog called a “hidden waiting list”. “People wait for a GP appointment; they wait for their GP to tell them they will be referred; they wait for the hospital to confirm that referral; and then they join a hospital waiting list,” it said. “NHS statistics monitor only the hospital waiting list, leaving the steps between getting a GP referral and a letter confirming a hospital appointment as a dangerous ‘blind spot’ for the NHS and patients.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: The Times, 11 April 2023
  9. News Article
    The four-day strike by junior doctors in England will have a “catastrophic impact” on NHS waiting lists, with up to 350,000 appointments and operations likely to be cancelled, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation has said. Matthew Taylor said the industrial action this week posed risks to patient safety and called on the public to avoid “risky behaviour”. “These strikes are going to have a catastrophic impact on the capacity of the NHS to recover services,” he told Sky News. “The health service has to meet high levels of demand at the same time as making inroads into that huge backlog that built up before Covid, but then built up much more during Covid." He said he hoped everyone who needed urgent care would get it, but added: “There’s no point hiding the fact that there will be risks to patients – risks to patient safety, risks to patient dignity – as we’re not able to provide the kind of care that we want to.” He called on the public to use NHS services responsibly. Read full story Source; The Guardian, 10 April 2023
  10. News Article
    The NHS should abolish many of its national targets while shifting its focus towards preventive healthcare, according to a review by a former Labour health secretary. The study by Patricia Hewitt, commissioned by the government said that, while targets can help concentrate the minds of those responsible for a service, having too many makes them less effective. It comes at a time when record numbers of people are on NHS waiting lists and as the health service in England continues to miss targets on A&E waits, the speed of ambulance responses, and cancer treatment times. The review sets out new targets and failing to provide adequate funding for new initiatives makes it far harder to plan new services and recruit staff. It adds that an excessive focus on hitting targets by managers can lead to “gaming” of the targets and a “disastrous neglect of patients themselves”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 April 2023
  11. News Article
    Adults in Northern Ireland seeking assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are being forced to go private because of a dire lack of referral services in some areas, a charity has said. Some health trusts have not been able to accept new referrals for adult assessment and diagnosis. ADHD charities said a lack of services or even waiting lists has forced many people to pay for a private diagnosis. The charity's chief executive Sarah Salters added that some people who do get a private diagnosis cannot then get medication from their GP through the NHS. The Department of Health said officials "are considering longer-term arrangements" for ADHD services, with future decisions "likely to be subject to ministerial approval and availability of funding". Read full story Source: BBC News, 2 April 2023
  12. News Article
    Thousands of children experiencing “unacceptable” long waits for NHS treatment face a “lifelong” impact on their health, a senior doctor has warned, as shocking figures reveal that nearly 15,000 paediatric operations were cancelled over the last year. Dr Camilla Kingdon, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said the mounting treatment backlog in England risked “serious” and “devastating” physical and mental consequences for children and their families. She sounded the alarm as data obtained under freedom of information laws by the Liberal Democrats showed that a record high 14,628 children’s operations were postponed in 2022, up from 11,870 the year before and the highest in five years of data examined. Some children have now waited several years for surgery, according to the data. Delaying a child’s operation risks having a “lifelong impact” on their development, Kingdon said, and also “seriously impact” their mental health, with knock-on effects on their ability to socialise, go to school and reach their full potential. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 3 April 2023
  13. News Article
    New restrictions are being introduced for autism assessments, with some areas now only accepting referrals for patients in crisis, HSJ has learned. Commissioners in North Yorkshire and York have become the latest to introduce new criteria for autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder referrals. Getting a diagnosis is key to unlocking care packages such as speech and language therapy, counselling, or special educational needs. They said the changes are due to “unprecedented demand that has exceeded supply, resulting in unacceptable wait times and the need to prioritise resources towards children and most at-risk adults”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 30 March 2023
  14. News Article
    National NHS forecasts are predicting there will be around 11,000 patients on the elective waiting list who have been waiting longer than 78 weeks at the start of April, the target for clearing this cohort, HSJ understands. Senior NHS figures familiar with the forecasts told HSJ they had stood at around 9,000 last week, but mass cancellations during the three-day junior doctors’ strike had pushed up the potential outstanding cases by approximately 2,000. One senior NHS figure close to national efforts said they “hoped” trusts could cut the figure to under 10,000 by the deadline, and that intense work was going on across systems to ensure the figure was as small as possible. It is understood system leaders expect the 78-week breach figure to be cut to around 2,000 by the summer. However, as has been the case for the 104-week breaches, they are also predicting a long tail due to a combination of complex cases and patients choosing to wait longer. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 23 March 2023
  15. News Article
    An eight-year-old girl waiting three years to have three teeth removed has been left in "agony". Ella Mann, from Dovercourt in Essex, first went to the dentist with an issue with a baby tooth in December 2019. She was given a temporary filling and told it needed to be removed but has still not had the NHS procedure. The youngster has now been placed on an NHS waiting list for the tooth extraction. Ella's dad Charlie Mann, 54, said his daughter was sometimes in "agony". Healthwatch England last year warned of people struggling to get dental treatment as increasing practices closed to new patients. A BBC investigation identified cases of people driving hundreds of miles in search of treatment and pulling out their own teeth without anaesthesia. Read full story Source: BBC News, 23 March 2023
  16. News Article
    An acute trust and its integrated care system have said they risk missing the imminent waiting list target, after struggling to get as many patients treated in the independent sector as they hoped. University Hospitals of North Midlands Trust and Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent ICS have found that some patients who had earlier been referred to independent providers, had then, while waiting for IS treatment, got sicker or became high risk to such an extent that they needed to be referred back to UHNM. Other patients have declined being transferred to the independent sector, board meetings heard. Phil Smith, chief delivery officer at Staffordshire and Stoke-On-Trent Integrated Care Board, told its meeting last week he needed to “flag an escalated risk” to meeting the target, after deterioration in activity “linked to industrial action, linked to the willingness of patients to be treated in the independent sector and the independent sector’s ability to treat patients”. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 22 March 2023
  17. News Article
    Young people with eating disorders are coming to harm and ending up in A&E because they are being denied care and forced to endure long waits for treatment, GPs have revealed. NHS eating disorders services are so overwhelmed by a post-Covid surge in problems such as anorexia that they are telling under-19s to rely on charities, their parents or self-help instead. The “truly shocking” findings about the help available to young people with often very fragile mental health emerged in a survey of 1,004 family doctors across the UK by the youth mental health charity stem4. The shortage of beds for children and young people with eating disorders is so serious that some are being sent hundreds of miles from home or ending up on adult psychiatric wards, GPs say. “The provision is awful and I worry my young patients may die,” one GP in the south-east of England told stem4. Another described the specialist NHS services available in their area as “virtually non-existent and not fit for purpose”. Read full story Source: The Guardian, 22 March 2023
  18. News Article
    Children must now be in crisis before they can be referred for an autism diagnosis, parents claim. The strict new eligibility criteria in the Bristol region comes after a 350% rise in the number waiting more than two years for assessment. Changes made by the NHS mean children will only be referred with "severe and enduring" mental health issues. The Integrated Care Board (ICB) said it meant resources could now focus on those with "the highest clinical need". Some parents have launched the campaign Assess for Autism in protest against the rule change. An Assess for Autism spokesperson said children would now have to be at crisis point before being referred, describing the policy as "deeply concerning" and "regressive". However, healthcare provider Sirona, which provides autism diagnosis services, and the Integrated Care Board (ICB), which formally approved the new policy, insist it is necessary because families are waiting too long. They said resources can now be focused on those with the "highest clinical need or are the most vulnerable". Read full story Source: BBC News, 22 March 2023
  19. News Article
    Hundreds of patients have lost their eyesight or had it irreparably damaged because of NHS backlogs, new research suggests. NHS England clinicians have filed 551 reports of patients who lost their sight as a result of delayed appointments since 2019, with 219 resulting in “moderate or severe harm”, according to an FoI request by the Association of Optometrists, which believes that hundreds more cases are unreported. Its chief executive, Adam Sampson, said sight loss was a “health emergency”, and urged ministers to introduce a national eye health strategy to enable high street and community optometrists to ease some of the burden on hospitals. He said: “There are good treatments available for common age-related eye conditions like macular degeneration but many hospital trusts simply do not have the capacity to deliver services. “Optometry is ideally placed to take away some of that burden – optometrists are already qualified to provide many of the extended services needed and are available on every high street, so patients can be treated closer to home. It’s incomprehensible and absolutely tragic that patients are waiting, losing their vision, in many parts of the country because of the way eye healthcare is commissioned.” Read full story Source: The Guardian, 21 March 2023
  20. News Article
    The pressure to tackle long waiting lists in children’s community services is impacting care quality, clinical leaders have warned. It comes after community health services waiting list figures were published for the first time by NHS England last week. They revealed more than 200,000 children were waiting, of whom 12,000 had been waiting more than a year, and 65,000 more than 18 weeks. While adult community services lists have been coming down fairly steadily since the autumn, children’s services are failing to make progress. The children’s services with the longest lists are community paediatrics (which mostly deals with neurological development issues such as autism and ADHD), speech and language therapy, and children’s occupational therapy. Specialists in those areas told HSJ it was the result of staffing gaps, rising and more complex demand, Covid backlog, and years of underfunding. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 20 March 2023
  21. News Article
    More than 175,000 patient appointments and surgeries were postponed this week during the three-day junior doctor walk-out, it has emerged. NHS leaders have warned the strikes were the most disruptive yet with more appointments cancelled across three days than across any of the previous nurse strikes. Data published by the NHS showed in total 181,049 patients had their care postponed, this included more than 5,000 mental health and hundreds of community health appointments. The news comes after nursing and ambulance unions accepted a pay offer from the government, for a 5.3 per cent increase in 2023-24, which their members will now vote on. Read full story Source: The Independent, 18 March 2023
  22. News Article
    The NHS’s efforts to prop up emergency departments with thousands of additional medical staff has been the wrong approach to solving the crisis in these services, experts have argued. Analysis of NHS staffing data by HSJ shows the emergency care medical workforce has grown by almost two-thirds since 2016, far outstripping the growth in other specialties. Despite this, waiting times in accident and emergency have deteriorated significantly over the same period. John Appleby, chief economist at the Nuffield Trust think tank, said: “Cramming the A&E department with more doctors doesn’t look like it’s having the intended effect over the last four to five years. Waiting times have got worse and we have more staff. “Increasing staffing has helped with waiting times in the past, but maybe we have reached a point where it’s not staffing in A&E which is the issue. The issue is the front door and the backdoor of the A&E.” Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 17 March 2023
  23. News Article
    The disruption caused by the junior doctors' strike in England could take weeks to resolve, health bosses say. Tens of thousands of appointments and treatments, including cancer care, had to be cancelled during the three-day walkout. Patients with appointments coming up may see them cancelled to make room for high-priority cases hit by the strike. Hospitals are also reporting problems discharging patients from wards, as consultants were sent to cover A&E. Saffron Cordery, of NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, said the scale and length of the walkout, coupled with the fact it started on a Monday - traditionally the busiest day of the week - had made it more difficult than previous strikes by nurses and ambulance staff. "It will take weeks to recover - just rebooking patients who have treatments and appointments cancelled is a big job," she said. "Patients have to be individually prioritised - it may mean some patients with bookings in the coming weeks being pushed further back." Read full story Source: BBC News, 16 March 2023
  24. News Article
    Data revealed for the first time shows nearly three-quarters of adult patients needing community mental health care are waiting more than four weeks for treatment to start, which is the timeframe that NHS England wants to introduce as a national standard. Figures shared with HSJ also show two-thirds of children needing community care are waiting more than four weeks from referral to treatment. In 2021, NHS England proposed a series of new waiting time standards in mental health, including a four-week standard for non-urgent community care. A lack of new funding, as well as data recording problems, mean the new standards have not so far been introduced, and no timeline set for implementation. Read full story (paywalled) Source: HSJ, 14 March 2023
  25. Content Article
    A BBC Newsnight investigation hears devastating evidence and testimony of ambulance failings in the north east of England. What does it take to run a safe service that patients can trust? 
×
×
  • Create New...