Catastrophic impact of Covid on waiting lists at hospitals

CHARITIES and health organisations warned of the Covid-19 pandemic’s “catastrophic” impact on NHS services as new figures revealed that the number of people in England waiting to begin hospital treatment has risen to a record high.

According to data from NHS England, a total of 4.7 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of February 2021 – the highest figure since records began in August 2007.

The number of people waiting more than 52 weeks to start their hospital treatment stood at 387,885 in February 2021 – the highest number for any calendar month since December 2007. A year ago, the number of those having to wait more than 52 weeks to start treatment stood at just 1,613. Health workers have faced enormous pressures throughout the pandemic, which has pushed up hospital waiting times.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the Government will ensure the NHS has the funds it needs to tackle the build-up in waiting lists.

“We do need people to take up their appointments and to get the treatment that they need,” he said. “We’re going to make sure that we give the NHS all the funding that it needs, as we have done throughout the pandemic, to beat the backlog.”

NHS England highlighted that staff had delivered almost two million operations and other elective care in January and February, one of the busiest periods of the pandemic. It said around two in five of all patients who received hospital treatment for Covid-19 were admitted in those first two months of the year.

Dr Susan Crossland, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: “This data shows pressure is high and growing despite the fall in Covid cases and this was prior to the country starting to come out of lockdown.

“Just this week the workload in acute medical units has felt to many like the pre-pandemic ‘eternal winters’ we had been working through for too long.

“The scale of pressure on the system is illustrated by the fact the number waiting more that 12 hours in an ED (emergency department) last month has doubled compared to March in 2019 pre-pandemic despite overall attendances and admissions being vastly reduced.”

Figures also showed that the number of people admitted for routine hospital treatment was down 47% in February compared with a year earlier.

Some 152,642 patients were admitted for treatment during the month, compared with 285,918 in February 2020. Because 2020 was a leap year, February contained 29 days rather than the usual 28. The year-on-year decrease in January was 54%, while in December 2020 the drop was 25%.

Data shows 1.9 million elective procedures or support for patients took place amid the recent winter surge of Covid-19 infections and there were some 2.6 million A&E visits in that period, NHS England said.

Figures also show 174,624 urgent cancer referrals were made by GPs in February, compared with 190,369 a year before a year-on-year drop of 8%.

Meanwhile, almost 330,000 patients had been waiting more than six weeks for a key diagnostic test in February.

Sara Bainbridge, head of policy at Macmillan Cancer Support, said the data “further illustrates the catastrophic impact of Covid-19 on cancer diagnosis and treatment”.