NHS chief: 5m will be waiting for ops by 2021
...so we need the Brexit £350m NOW
A RECORD five million patients – one in ten – will be waiting for a hospital operation in four years’ time, the NHS chief has warned.
Simon Stevens said he would be forced to ‘abolish’ patients’ legal right to be treated promptly unless the Government urgently increases funding.
He claimed the NHS would need to draw up national ‘ rationing’ guidelines to further restrict the availability of non- urgent surgery such as hip and knee operations.
Mr Stevens also urged ministers to ‘honour’ their pledge of giving the NHS an extra £350million a week if Britain left the EU.
He predicted that 2018 would be the ‘toughest financial year’ in the NHS’s history, with funding levels ‘set to nosedive’.
In the absence of a cash injection from the Government, the waiting list for routine operations would reach its ‘ highest number ever’, he said.
There are currently four million awaiting non-urgent surgery – the highest level in a decade – but Mr Stevens predicted this would rise to five million by 2021.
He said GPs and nurses would ‘retrench and retreat’ – because of pay freezes and working conditions – and cancer survival rates would level off.
Mr Stevens’s remarks came during a speech at a conference in Birmingham for NHS Providers, which represents 230 hospital, ambulance and community trusts. It is a clear warning shot to the Government ahead of the Budget in two weeks’ time.
Demand for the NHS has reached an unprecedented level because the population is rising and ageing, and more people are succumbing to lifestyle-related illnesses. It is also having to foot the bill for
‘Highest number ever’
the latest medicines and operations to ensure that survival rates for illnesses such as cancer continue to improve.
The Government promised to inject an extra £8billion into the NHS between 2015 and 2020 but Mr Stevens and other healthcare leaders have argued this is not enough. He refused to be drawn on exactly how much more the NHS needs, although its budget for 2017/18 is just under £124billion. But he said he broadly agreed with an analysis by three leading think-tanks this week that the Government should invest at least an extra £4billion.
Mr Stevens said the public had ‘a right to know’ what the consequences of the Government not injecting more cash would mean.
‘It’s going to be extremely difficult to expand mental health services or improve cancer care … And crucially … the NHS waiting list will grow to five million people by 2021 … One in ten of us will be waiting for an operation – the highest number ever.’
He said the Department of Health would have to ‘abolish’ patients’ legal right to surgery or treatment within 18 weeks.
Mr Stevens added the NHS would have to produce a set of rationing guidelines setting out that patients could have hip or knee replacements only if they were in a certain level of pain.
Such restrictions are already in place in some health trusts and have been widely condemned by NHS England and other health experts, but Mr Stevens said they would become universal.
He called on ministers to honour their pledges that the NHS would get an additional £350million a week by leaving the EU. Quoting the slogan from the Vote Leave campaign bus, he said: ‘“Vote Leave for a better funded health service – £350million a week” … clear Brexit funding commitments to NHS patients – promises entered into by Cabinet ministers and MPs.’ If the NHS was aiming to compete with healthcare in France or Germany, ‘we are underfunding our health service by £20 to £30billion a year’, he said.
A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘We are committed to a world- class NHS, which is why we’re backing it with an extra £8billion investment by 2021.’