Criticism as NHS hip ops ‘rationed’ to save money

THE Royal College of Surgeons has hit out at cost-cutting plans to ration who can receive hip and knee replacements.

Three Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) – Redditch and Bromsgrove, South Worcestershire, and Wyre Forest – have proposed slashing the number of people who qualify for hip replacements by 12 per cent and introducing a 19 per cent cut over who is eligible for knee replacements.

They intend to change their scoring system for eligibility, hoping to prevent about 350 operations needing to be carried out each year saving £2 million a year.

This would include only treating “severe to the upper end of moderate” cases, and people who are obese with a body mass index of 35 or over needing to lose 10 per cent of their weight unless their problems were very severe.

Patients would need to have such severe levels of pain that they cannot sleep or carry out daily tasks to qualify.

Documents said a “patient’s pain and disability should be sufficiently severe that it interferes with the patient’s daily life and/or ability to sleep”.

But the Royal College of Surgeons said there was “no clinical justification” for their plans.

Stephen Cannon, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said: “While the CCGs have stated they hope this policy will save them £2 million a year, it is unclear whether they have considered the costs of not treating a patient.

“This could include the cost of pain relief medication and a later operation when the patient does meet the required pain and weight thresholds.

“Delaying access to surgery also adversely affects a patient’s quality of life and surgical outcomes, meaning the operation may not be as beneficial as if it had been carried out earlier.”

Meanwhile, local health authorities are also depriving desperate couples of fertility treatment in a bid to save money.

Methods include arbitrarily reducing the age limit at which treatment stops being available, refusing treatment if one partner has a child from a previous relationship, or refusing to provide a full course of treatment.

Health Minister Nicola Blackwood said she would demand that CCGs provide the same level of service across the country. Birmingham Labour MP Steve McCabe and Ed Vaizey, a Conservative MP who was a Government Minister until July 2016, have all raised concerns.

Four CCGs have ended assisted conception services, and one in ten are consulting on reducing or decommissioning fertility treatment.