Crisis as our hospitals battle longest waiting lists in all of Yorkshire
NHS BOSSES SAY TACKLING ISSUEE WILL TAKE ‘YEARS, NOT MONTHS’
BRINGING down waiting times for appointments at Hull hospitals, which are the longest in Yorkshire, will take “years, not months” as coronavirus continues to impact services, health professionals have said.
Representatives of the NHS, including from Hull University Teaching Hospitals Trust and the East Yorkshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), told councillors coronavirus had had an “appalling” impact on waiting times.
The latest NHS England figures on waiting times showed there were 56,554 incomplete “pathways”, including procedures and treatment, at the Hull trust as of August.
Of those waits, 59.4 per cent or 33,593 were longer than 18 weeks, the NHS’S target for waiting times.
East Riding Council’s Health, Care and Wellbeing Overview and Scrutiny Committee heard the trust was considering putting temporary operating theatres on hospital sites to perform particular treatment to clear backlogs.
Councillors heard the Government’s decision to cancel all elective treatment procedures for four months earlier in the pandemic also caused waiting lists to grow.
It comes as NHS officials gave updates on how health services were dealing with the effects of coronavirus and long-term improvement plans under the Humber Acute Services Review.
Hull University Teaching Hospitals Trust chief executive Chris Long told councillors long waiting times were partly down to it being larger than others and offering more services.
But he added coronavirus had had a knock-on effect, placing more strain on services that were already y working close to their capacity.
Mr Long said: “The challenge e is complex, but the reason we’ve e got bigger waiting lists is because e we’re bigger than most other trusts around us. We also offer a range of services, like for strokes and d oncology, that others wouldn’t offer. .
“We’ve looked at patients who are waiting and we’ve put them into four priority groups, with those in one needing immediate treatment and four being those patients who can wait.
“We’re ’ putting together h a plan l to turn around those in the priority three and four groups as possible.
“We’re working with the York Trust to pool waiting lists and resources to deal with those in priorities three h and d four f as quickly kl as possible.
“For example, we’ve facilities that are less Bridlington.”
He added: “We’re looking at getlooked at busy, like
ting a couple of modular operating theatres in there and just looking at orthopaedics and turning Bridlington into an orthopaedic factory for want of a better word to work through those as quickly as possible.
“Coronavirus has had the most appalling impact on waiting lists up and down the country.
“We’re all working together to try and overcome that and get it under control. But we’re talking about a process that’s going to take years, not months.
“Coronavirus has shown us how close to capacity we already were, so the pandemic has knocked us further back.
“When we’re looking at patients on waiting lists now, we’re asking if they need to see us and if they do, whether they need to be seen by a specialist or if someone else can see them.”
Cllr Caroline Fox asked Mr Long what hospital staff were doing to ensure patients without coronavirus did not get infected.
She said she knew residents in her Snaith Airmyn and Rawcliffe and
Marshlands ward who had gone into hospital for cancer treatment, been put on wards with coronavirus patients and had died.
Mr Long said the trust used techniques such as barrier nursing to separate patients “extensively” to stop infections spreading in hospitals.
Mr Long said: “We have three types of patients coming into us at the moment.
“There are those coronavirus but also illnesses, those who who have have other have just coronavirus i and d those th who h are sick ik and don’t have coronavirus.
“There’s also a fourth type of patients who come in for non-coronavirus care but we don’t know if they have the virus or not because we haven’t tested them yet.
“They’re split between different zones in hospital so they’re cared for in different areas and we do our best not to mix them up.”
Councillors also asked the health professionals about plans for patients in their Humber Acute Services Review.
The review, currently ongoing, aims to improve efficiency by putting specialists into Humberwide teams, as well as improving patient transport and making use of digital technology.
It also proposes creating Centres of Excellence, where specialist services are concentrated in one place so patients can go through several stages of consultation and treatment without repeat hospital visits.
Officials including Tracey Craggs and Emma Latimer, both of East Yorkshire CCG, told councillors th they were also focusing on im improving the NHS’S reach into ru rural community through improved p patient transport.
Cllr Fox and Cllr Barbara Jeffers son, of North Holderness ward, both said several residents had raised travel with them as many were too sick or elderly to drive or use public transport.
Officials told councillors they were looking at using the internet and digital technologies for appointments, a process already under way due to coronavirus.
The trust’s Dr Makina Purva said although proposed Centres of Excellence could leave some patients further away from specialist services, a “one stop shop” approach would mean fewer repeat visits.
The doctor added patients could go to a centre and have several appointments, treatments and other procedures in one go rather than travelling to different sites several times.