Patients suffer as NHS goes through worst winter crisis

THE NHS has had the worst winter crisis on record, official figures show, with a 100,000 rise in the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for surgery.

Thousands of operations were cancelled as Accident & Emergency departments faced unprecedented demand, with a steep rise in numbers left to endure long waits for urgent care.

Now, the number waiting more than 18 weeks for operations has soared by 39 per cent in a year. In total, 367,094 patients were waiting this long in February compared with 263,589 a year earlier. And the number of patients forced to wait more than a year for surgery rose to its highest level since August 2012, with 1,583 such cases.

This week, the NHS was warned that on current trends, the number of patients waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment is set to more than double by 2020, to 800,000. Last month Simon Stevens, head of the NHS, said a rise in waiting times for routine procedures, which include hip and knee operations and cataract removal, might be a “trade off ” for improvement in other areas, such as hitting the four-hour A&E target, and better cancer care.

Yesterday a Royal College of Surgeons spokeswoman said the decision “risks undoing much of the progress the NHS has made on reducing long waiting times over the last decade”.

The NHS statistics show that 195,764 patients waited more than four hours in A&E this winter, a five-fold increase in five years. The figure was 40,791 in 2011/12.

The figure is the highest since records began and marks a sharp spike on winter last year when 134,576 patients missed the four-hour target.

Extreme waiting times also reached record levels, as 1,877 patients were forced to wait at least 12 hours in A&E after doctors decided they required admission – up from 375 the year before.

And delays for cancer patients were among the worst on record, with just 79.8 per cent of patients seen within 62 days of an urgent GP referral, below a target of 85 per cent.

An NHS England spokesman said: “February was the first month this year where A&E performance returned to similar levels to a year ago, and diagnostic waits were the lowest in three years. The NHS is now focused on delivering the improvements set out in the Next Steps on the Forward View plan.”