Call for true seven-day NHS as wards lie idle
A full weekend hospital service could clear the backlog, free up beds and shorten waiting times
Only two in 10 hospital appointments take place between Friday and Sunday, data reveal, amid calls for the NHS to become a seven-day service. Analysis of outpatient appointments, which include seeing a cancer specialist after a GP referral, post-surgery follow-ups and physiotherapy, shows 80 per cent happen between Monday and Thursday. Just 37,634 booked appointments took place on an average Sunday in 2021-22, compared to 489,479 on a Tuesday.
ONLY two in 10 hospital appointments take place between Friday and Sunday, data reveal, amid calls for the NHS to become a full seven-day service.
Analysis of outpatient appointments, which include seeing a cancer specialist after a GP referral, post-surgery follow-ups and physiotherapy, show 80 per cent took place Monday to Thursday. Just 37,634 booked appointments took place on an average Sunday in 2021-22, compared with 489,479 on a Tuesday. It comes after experts warned NHS hospitals were like the “Marie Celeste” on Fridays, with car parks empty by the afternoon.
Dr Andrew Stein, a kidney specialist, said the NHS would not hit its elective
recovery targets until it became a seven-day service. The health service aims to eliminate waits of 18 months by April 2023. Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary, suggested this week that doctors’ failure to work at weekends was leading to blockages within the system as fewer patients were discharged.
Speaking at the NHS Providers conference in Liverpool he urged hospitals to question “what is within their control” to help clear the flow of patients through hospitals and free up beds.
“Consultants at the weekend — what can they do?” he said.
The data, from NHS Digital and analysed by The Daily Telegraph, also show appointment attendance is higher on weekends, suggesting patients are more likely to show up if the appointment is not scheduled on a weekday.
On average, 78 per cent of appointments were attended Monday to Friday, but on the weekends this jumped to 84 per cent on Saturday and 85 per cent on Sunday. The share of appointments held on Friday, Saturday and Sunday has also barely increased since 2015, when the then-health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, first pledged that the NHS should be a seven day service.
In 2015-16, 18 per cent of outpatient appointments were held on the last three days of the week, but this has only increased to 20 per cent as of 2021-22.
In its 2015 manifesto, the Conservative Party pledged hospitals would be “properly staffed, so that the quality of care is the same every day of the week”.
The Government also previously committed that anyone needing urgent care would have access to the same quality “whatever day of the week it is”.
But this data call into question if patients are being offered a true sevenday NHS service. Mr Hunt’s 2015 push for a seven-day NHS created significant tensions with the workforce, ultimately resulting in the junior doctors’ strike.
At the time he cited studies that suggested patients received worse care on weekends and were more likely to die.
Subsequent studies have found fewer doctors working on the weekend is not linked higher mortality rates.
One study, published in the journal Health Services and Delivery Research last year, found a lack of hospital consultants on duty was not driving the higher mortality rates, but rather “poorly integrated” GP and community services with hospitals “was a barrier to introducing seven-day services” as patients arrived sicker.
It comes as the NHS is facing a backlog of 7.1 million patients waiting to start treatment and more than 460,000 waiting longer than the six week target for a key diagnostic test.
Delays discharging patients from hospital create a gridlock in the system, with patients in A&E unable to be admitted to ward beds. Around 13,000 patients remain stuck in hospital, on average every day, despite no longer needing to be there.
An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS is already a seven day service with staff working across the weekend in A&E’S, pharmacies, urgent treatment centres, ambulance services, GP practices and vaccination centres, as well as delivering planned care on Saturdays and Sundays in hospitals including operations, outpatient appointments, and diagnostic tests and checks.”
They added the NHS is performing regular Super Saturdays, “where the same surgery is performed multiple times a day in theatres over a weekend, increasing efficiency”.