4.7m on list for NHS treatment

CHARITIES and health organisations warned of the Covid-19 pandemic’s “catastrophic” impact on NHS services as new figures revealed that the number of people in England waiting to begin hospital treatment has risen to a new record high.

According to data from NHS England, a total of 4.7 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of February 2021 – the highest figure since records began in August 2007.

The number of people waiting more than 52 weeks to start their hospital treatment stood at 387,885 in February 2021 – the highest number for any calendar month since December 2007.

A year ago, in February 2020, the number of those having to wait more than 52 weeks to start treatment stood at just 1,613.

Health workers have faced enormous pressures throughout the pandemic, which has pushed up hospital waiting times.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Government will ensure the NHS has the funds it needs to tackle the build-up in waiting lists.

“We do need people to take up their appointments and to get the treatment that they need,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that we give the NHS all the funding that it needs, as we have done throughout the pandemic, to beat the backlog.”

NHS England highlighted that staff had delivered almost two million operations and other elective care in January and February, one of the busiest periods of the pandemic. It said around two in five of all patients who have received hospital treatment for Covid-19 were admitted in those first two months of the year.

Dr Susan Crossland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: “This data shows pressure is high and growing despite the fall in Covid cases and this was prior to the country starting to come out of lockdown. Just this week the workload in acute medical units has felt to many like the prepandemic ‘eternal winters’ we had been working through for too long.

“The scale of pressure on the system is illustrated by the fact the number waiting more that 12 hours in an ED (emergency department) last month has doubled compared to March in 2019 pre-pandemic despite overall attendances and admissions being vastly reduced.”

Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, said the figures showed “how hard trusts are working to recover care backlogs as well as the size of the future challenge they face, despite a decline in Covid-19 patients”.

Figures also showed that the number of people admitted for routine hospital treatment was down 47% in February compared with a year earlier.

NHS England also said February saw 22,000 people begin treatment for cancer, in line with February 2020, while the 174,000 people being referred for cancer checks was twice as many as during the peak of the first Covid-19 wave in April last year.