Hospital patient faced two-year wait for op, trust reveals
ASINGLE patient of Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust faced a two-year wait to start treatment.
The 104-week wait was highlighted in a response to a Freedom of Information request the PA news agency sent to 125 non-specialist acute hospital trusts in England.
Trusts were asked how many patients had been waiting for three years, then four years, and then the longest period a patient had been waiting for an appointment.
The longest period of time in weeks that a Gloucestershire patient was kept waiting after being referred was 104 for upper gastrointestinal surgery.
The response did show that in Gloucestershire no patients had been waiting more than three or four years for treatment – unlike in some other places.
Overall, the responses revealed more than 23,000 people in England had been waiting for NHS care for more than two years.
Last week, the trust board was told that latest statistics showed that during February the trust did not meet national standards for year-long – or 52-week – waits, diagnostics or the four-hour emergency department standard.
Chief executive, Deborah Lee, said the trust and its health care partners were “working to improve a series of quality standards”.
But the board heard the trust was still experiencing exceptional pressure in urgent and emergency care, with the average number of overall attendances at nearly 400 patients a day.
Ambulance handover delays were now so significant they created a risk to response times for Category 2 calls – those defined as serious conditions, such as a stroke or chest pain that could require rapid assessment and urgent transport.
Ms Lee acknowledged admission waits in the emergency department were “considerable and associated with harm”.
At the other extreme, the wider focus was on some 200 patients who no longer required acute hospital care but were unable to be discharged to onward social care, said Ms Lee.
“Extensive work is in hand to address both the root causes of poor flow and to mitigate the risks until such time the pressures are eased.
“System working involving all partners remains strong and a number of improvements to flow have been achieved.
“We need to reduce the numbers of patients in our hospital for discharge, which means a focus on both our back door but also our front door to ensure that we do not admit frail patients to hospital unless there is no alternative, given the likelihood that these patients will have a protracted length of stay with all the associated consequences,” she said.
The board heard the trust faces another full review from the Care Quality Commission next month, this time into its leadership and governance.
A CQC review released last month said Gloucestershire’s “complicated” health and care services should be streamlined to function effectively in future.
The trust goes into this latest review with statistics showing elective and diagnostic performance as strong. Cancer performance is also strong relative to the regional position.