Obese patients waiting for two
DERBY and Burton’s hospital trust is asking some patients on its waiting list to seek treatment elsewhere and a few have been sent 190 miles away, to Northumberland.
During a University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust board meeting this week, updates were given on its waiting lists of patients waiting for between a year and two years.
As of the latest figures provided by the trust, there are 5,433 patients who have waited longer than a year for care – when even having a single person on this list would have been a rarity before the pandemic. This figure has started to rise again after being halved from more than 10,000, a situation that was predicted due to winter pressures and Covid-related issues.
Meanwhile, 335 patients have been waiting for care for more than two years. The largest treatment types are: ■■Trauma and orthopaedics – 97
General surgery – 57 ■■Bariatric surgery service – 35 ■■Spinal surgery service – 32 ■■Colorectal surgery – 23
At Tuesday’s board meeting, Sharon Martin, the trust’s executive chief operating officer, detailed that some clinically overweight patients in
Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire – the bariatric surgery patients – would be asked to seek treatment elsewhere. She said: “The other big focus going on until the end of next month is getting 104-week waits down in elective care, usually priority four, who are patients who have waited the longest time because clinically they are not necessarily a high priority.
“We are struggling with capacity in orthopaedics and have moved some patients from Derby to Burton. We have got complex patients still remaining on the waiting list and we have got around 79 patients that we still need to treat.
“We are a regional centre for bariatric patients, these are patients with a high body mass index. We provide that for Derbyshire and for Nottinghamshire. Those patients weren’t able to have their surgery during Covid because it was deemed very high risk and we now are asking some of those patients to have their treatment elsewhere and some are agreeing to have their treatment elsewhere.
“We have got support from another organisation and that’s really positive and we are trying to encourage some of our patients to transfer and have their surgery there, but that is quite a