Stone residents will be pleased to hear that hospital bosses have said new services could help eliminate 15-month waits for treatment by the end of September.
Managers at University Hospitals of North Midlands expect the rollout of new gastroenterology and respiratory services to have a ‘significant impact’ on reducing the trust’s waiting list within days.
In May, the number of 65-week waiters at UHNM increased from 886 to 1,202. Before the pandemic, no patient was waiting more than a year, from referral to treatment, for elective care. But chief operating officer Simon Evans told a UHNM board meeting that the trust was still aiming to reduce the number of 65-week waits to zero by the end of September.
Up until now, ‘challenged specialities’ such as gastroenterology and respiratory have been standing in the way of efforts to eliminate year-long waits for treatment, with the trust having to resort to outsourcing to tackle the problem. Mr Evans said that the expansion of in-house provision for those specialities should now make a big difference. He said:
“I’m pleased to say that we’ve now authorised a substantial increase in the level of capacity for both those services, and we are expecting them, from this weekend, to start having a significant impact in reducing that waiting list.
“Our ambition is to get to a position of having no patients waiting more than 65 weeks by the end of September. That was a moderate risk for us, but I’m pleased say that risk is now reducing as we deploy these additional services.”
The COVID pandemic saw waiting lists explode at UHNM and across the NHS. Since then, the trust has also had to contend with multiple critical incidents due to rocketing demand, which have resulted in appointments being cancelled. UHNM’s approach to tackling the post-COVID backlog has been to focus on eliminating the longest waits first.
But the latest figures presented to the board show that in May there were still eight patients waiting over 104 weeks for treatment, and 42 waiting more than 78 weeks. Mr Evans said that some of those two-year waits were patients transferred from other trusts due to ‘mutual aid’ agreements. He added:
“While we are still very much driven to deliver zero patients waiting for 78 weeks or more, it’s now highly likely that we will have patients waiting over 78 weeks and 104 weeks this month.
We’re expecting that to be single figures, but in reality, the likelihood of delivering zero in July is very slim now, unfortunately.”
The number of year-long waits rose to 5,318 in May, and UHNM expects this figure to continue to rise until the autumn.
