‘NHS NEEDS FUNDING TO GO UP, NOT DOWN’
SiR Keir said staff at Royal Derby Hospital were doing an incredible and amazing job and had pulled together to push through the past 12 months and prepare for what lies ahead. He was impressed at how staff had pulled together.
However he said: “One of the issues to fall out of the Budget is the realisation that the day-to-day funding for health and for the NHS is going to go down, not up.
“There is real concern because not only are we not through Covid yet, and you could see that in the Royal Derby which still has Covid people in there and is still struggling but also – and they are very clear about this – there is inevitably a backlog now of cases where people haven’t had more routine operations for many, many months.
“At the Royal Derby, they are planning for that. They have their systems in place, they know what is coming down the track, but for the Government to be withdrawing or cutting day-to-day funding for health at the time that we are running into the obvious next problem is wrong in principle.”
Sir Keir spoke about the battle which health services will face after the pandemic of working through a huge waiting list for patients needing routine surgeries and treatment, who have not been able to be treated due to operations being scaled back to focus on Covid.
in Derbyshire, as of December, this has seen the number of patients waiting for treatment more than 18 weeks (around four months) triple from 13.2% to 36.9%. This equates to 12,133 additional patients waiting four months or more for treatment and operations. it also means one in three are waiting in excess of four months.
Meanwhile, the reasonable worstcase scenario waiting time in Derbyshire has increased from 22 weeks to 49.4 weeks. This leaves 5,510 Derbyshire patients waiting nearly a year and in excess of a year for treatment.
Health officials say there are bracing for the work it will take to get through the backlog, which will take years.
Sir Keir said: “i don’t think it will match the pressure of Covid because it can be a bit more planned, but anybody who thinks that once we are through the vaccination programme and, hopefully that Covid numbers go down, that means the pressure comes off the NHS for a while has misunderstood the nature of the backlog in cases that is to come through. it is going to be very, very intense for the rest of the year at least in relation to all of those outstanding cases and then, of course, we’ll go back into next winter.
The Treasury Department has been approached for comment.