Prime Minister’s secret hospital visit
‘They have been working really fast throughout the pandemic’
The Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to the Kent Oncology Centre at Maidstone Hospital on Monday.
He was accompanied by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and local MPs Helen Grant, Tracey Crouch and Helen Whately.
No local media were allowed to attend the visit, but a speech was released afterwards.
Mr Johnson said: “One in nine of us is currently on an NHS waiting list - six million people across the country. Huge numbers that will keep going up.
“So we’re doing things to clear this Covid backlog.”
He said the Government would put £8m more into the NHS to finance elective surgery and would recruit 50,000 more nurses, but he said the NHS was already employing 45,000 more people now than last year.
He said with that help, the Government would be setting the NHS some “tough” targets so that “We can deliver for patients and for the taxpayer.”
He praised the Kent Oncology Centre saying: “They have been working really fast throughout the pandemic. They’ve kept the
level of treatments up so that they are almost the same as before Covid.”
He said he now wanted everywhere else in the country to match Maidstone’s success.
He said the Government would set a new target so that the “majority of people” who think they have cancer could receive a diagnosis within 28 days, and he said that should apply to “three out of four people” across the
country by March of next year.
He also said: “We want nobody to be on a waiting list for more than two months.”
He added: “These are very tough targets and we will make sure the NHS delivers them.”
One way to achieve that was a website initiative called My Planned Care, which would enable patients to compare waiting lists at various hospitals and elect where to have treatment.
Mr Johnson said: “If you are due an operation, you can look round and see where you can get it done faster - at somewhere like Maidstone for instance - then you can take advantage of that.
“So we will use patient choice to drive down waiting lists.”
The PM’s visit to the oncology unit comes as the House of Commons library revealed in an answer to Labour that nationally, between April and
November, almost 300,000 people had been unable to see a cancer specialist within two weeks of an urgent referral, the current guideline maximum wait.
The Kent Oncology Centre is run by Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust (MTW) which is one of only a handful of hospital trusts in the country to meet the national standard for treating cancer patients within 62 days and it has achieved this for29monthsinarow.
Mr Johnson was shown round the oncology centre and chemotherapy therapy day unit by consultant oncologist Dr Henry Taylor, who said: “Throughout the pandemic staff continued to safely deliver all cancer treatments. Our clinical teams quickly redesigned patient care pathways and face to face appointments became virtual or telephone consultations. Multi-disciplinary teams also worked together, developing new ways of working which ensured we continued to diagnose and treat cancers as quickly as possible.”
Mr Johnson was told that over the past 10 months the trust had also been concentrating on reducing the time that patients were waiting for elective surgery, with currently only one person waiting more than 52 weeks.
A new oncology outpatients department is due to open later this year.