Prolapsed organs, bouts of paralysis and an unexplored heart problem: these are some of the conditions facing patients in Britain as a result of the NHS’s ever-increasing waiting lists.
More than 7.6 million cases in England – related to 6.37 million patients – were on the waiting list in December, the latest NHS England data shows, with two in five (3.3 million) spending more than four months waited and one in twenty (337,450). ) have to wait longer than a year.
The waiting list fell for the third month in a row in December and is slightly lower than the month before, with 0.1% fewer registrations.
The figures come just days after Rishi Sunak admitted he had failed to deliver on his pledge to reduce healthcare waiting lists.
“We haven’t made enough progress,” the Prime Minister said in an interview with Piers Morgan on TalkTV on Monday. Asked if that meant he had failed, Sunak said: “Yes, we did.”
The latest waiting list figure represents a 66% increase on the 4.57 million cases in February 2020, the last full month before the start of the Covid pandemic.
The numbers alone belie the impact of the delays.
The size of the waiting list is taking “a huge human and economic toll”, said King’s Fund chief analyst Siva Anandaciva, and it is “absolutely wrong” to think people “can wait without consequences”.
He added: “If care is delayed, people’s conditions and symptoms may worsen, their mental health will deteriorate, their social network will suffer and this will also impact the amount of care and support they provide to loved ones. can offer. The consequences (of delaying care) can affect many different areas of your life.”
Louisa* suffered multi-organ prolapse during a traumatic birth of her first child in June 2019 that involved forceps. The condition means that more than 1cm of her organs, such as the uterus and bladder, protrude from the vaginal opening.
She went to her GP in London when she noticed it six months after giving birth. “The doctor saw that it was hanging around and said, ‘We can’t do anything about that anymore.’ I was quite sad about it at the time, but didn’t pursue it any further.”
In the summer of 2021, during an obstetrics and gynecology appointment to discuss a caesarean section for her second child, she was told that her prolapse could and should have been treated.
Initially, Louisa postponed surgery to care for her newborn son. However, a few months after the family moved to Manchester in July 2022, she requested a referral for surgery. She’s still waiting.
“In the meantime, I can’t do much exercise. When I need milk, I use the car because the weight of carrying it causes problems. I used to be an active and fit person – now I don’t do anything and my mental health is worse,” she said.
Data from NHS England shows that the number of people waiting for gynecology services has doubled since February 2020. Almost half of them have been waiting more than 18 weeks.
Dr. Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, said women’s health continues to be “deprioritized and overlooked”.
“We are asking the NHS to rethink the way care is prioritised,” she said. “Although often referred to as ‘benign’, common conditions such as prolapse and fibroids are often progressive and have a huge impact on a woman’s quality of life. Long waiting times can result in unnecessary emergency hospital admissions or more complex treatment needs.”
Scott* is also awaiting treatment. As I have suffered from numbness and paralysis over the years, the situation has become even worse. “I started developing pins and needles on the left side of my body,” he said.
Scott went to his GP, who referred him to a neurologist and a musculoskeletal service in February 2023. As a result, Scott had an MRI of the entire spine and shoulder in July. He is still waiting for an appointment to discuss the results of the scan.
“Meanwhile, my health has deteriorated exponentially over the past four weeks and I am now semi-paralysed in my foot,” he said. As a result, Scott has now had to give up his job as a care assistant.
Scott is also expecting a brain MRI this month, but has been told the next available appointment to discuss that scan won’t be until October.
He now has constant, excruciating pain in his left shoulder and arm and has spent vast sums of money on alternative therapies.
“I’m absolutely terrified,” Scott said. “I now rightly fear that my health may deteriorate even further and that I may remain completely paralyzed if I am not treated urgently.”
Sophie*, a 41-year-old medical writer from Glasgow, has also been left in limbo after the discovery of a heart murmur meant she was told she could not access treatment for her attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) until research into it was done.
Sophie’s doctor made an urgent referral for examination of her heart murmur in July 2023 – an appointment during which Sophie would have an echocardiogram. However, Sophie has since been told that the earliest she will be seen will be in May this year.
“If this is such a critical issue that it limits my options (for ADHD treatment) quite severely, shouldn’t it be a little sooner than almost a year from now?” she asked.
Despite making lifestyle and diet changes and taking other measures to manage her ADHD, Sophie now has difficulty working. “I just tendered my resignation,” she said, adding that she felt “constantly guilty” about the situation. “But I’ve literally tried everything, including pushing for different opinions, so I’m at a bit of an impasse.”
For some, the long wait is nothing new. As someone with a disability, Flora Renz, 35, said she was “quite used to NHS delays by now”.
An academic from Canterbury, she has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), which makes standing or walking, even for short durations, painful.
After severe hip pain in 2020, she was referred to a specialist young adult hip surgeon for torn cartilage. After trying other treatments, such as physio, she was put on the waiting list for surgery in November 2022. She was due to undergo surgery in November 2023 but had to postpone it due to Covid.
When she got in touch at the start of this year, she was shocked to hear her surgeon had left the NHS trust. With no replacement, all his operations were suspended. “He still works privately, but his going rate for the operation is just under £13,000, which is unfortunately out of my price range,” Renz said.
As a result of the wait, she is no longer able to walk as much as she used to and is experiencing spasms in the ligaments around her hip, using crutches or a wheelchair to walk. She worries about the long-term effect. But the delays also take their toll mentally.
“The indefinite wait is truly soul-destroying,” she said.
The NHS’s national medical director, Prof Sir Stephen Powis, said it had been an ‘extremely challenging winter’ and that a drop in the number of patients waiting for treatment and an improvement in ambulance response times was ‘evidence of the continued hard work and dedication of NHS staff.”
“Last week’s figures show that winter pressures continue to hit the NHS hard, with hundreds more flu patients in hospital every day compared to last year, and that difficulties in patient discharge are impacting on bed occupancy and the speed at which patients flow through hospitals.”
*names have been changed