‘Better plan needed’ to arrest decline in ops and cancer care

THE Government “has overseen years of decline” in NHS surgery and cancer care and needs a better plan for how to achieve better outcomes.

That’s according to the latest report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), which said that even before the pandemic, NHS capacity had not been increased sufficiently to meet growing demand.

The pandemic has seen waiting lists hit record highs, with the amount of time patients can expect to wait also rapidly increasing.

By the end of January, a record 6.10 million people were waiting for elective treatment, such as knee and hip operations, at NHS hospitals in England.

Just 62.8 per cent of people on the list had been waiting less than 18 weeks, the worst performance since February 2008. The target is that 92 per cent of people wait less than 18 weeks, but this has not been met since February 2016, well before the pandemic.

As part of its Elective Recovery Plan, the Government has said no one will wait longer than two years for treatment by July this year, with waits of over a year eliminated by March 2025. In January, 23,778 patients had been waiting more than two years for treatment, up from 20,065 in December, and a big rise from 2,608 in April 2021.

There were 311,528 people who had been waiting more a year - one in 20 people on the list. Since records began in August 2007, the NHS has never seen a month where no patients were waiting more than a year.

NHS Trusts were also routinely missing cancer treatment targets, before and during the pandemic.

In January, performance was the worst on record for eight out of nine standards set for diagnosis and treatment. Just 61.8 per cent of patients with an urgent referral for suspected cancer were treated within 62 days. The target of 85 per cent has not been hit since April 2014.

The number of people waiting more than two months was 5,161 in January. The Government has pledged to return the number waiting over 62 days to pre-pandemic levels, about 3,200 a month.

It has also pledged to hit a recently introduced target for 75 per cent of patients to be told they do or don’t have cancer within four weeks of an urgent referral. In January, this standard hit a 10-month low, with just 63.8 per cent of patients getting the news in 28 days.

Dame Meg Hillier MP, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee, said: “The the Department for Health and Social Care has overseen a long-term decline in elective and critical cancer care that is dragging our National Health Service and the heroic staff down.

“We are now extremely concerned there is no real plan to turn a large cash injection, for elective care and capital costs of dangerously crumbling facilities, into better outcomes for people waiting for life-saving or quality-of-life improving treatment.

“Nor is it obvious that the department finally understands that its biggest problem, and the only solution to all its problems, is the way it manages its greatest resource: our heroic NHS staff. Exhausted and demoralised, they’ve emerged from two hellish years only to face longer and longer lists of sicker people. And this is compounded by staffing shortages in a number of professional areas.”

TheDepartment for Health and Social Care said the pandemic had put unprecedented pressures on healthcare and the department is tackling this head on.

A spokesman said: “We have set out our action plan to deal with the Covid backlog and deliver long-term recovery and reform, backed by a record multibillion-pound investment over the next three years.”