NHS leaders have warned that Royal Mail’s plans to reduce second-tier deliveries to two days a week could jeopardize patient safety.
The changes are part of wider measures announced by Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distributions Services (IDS), which include cutting up to 9,000 routes. It could take more than two years to implement, saving £300 million a year. IDS has assured Royal Mail staff that there will be no compulsory redundancies and that they will only request 100 voluntary redundancies.
In a letter to the TelegraphExecutives from the NHS, Healthwatch England, the Patients Association and National Voices said Royal Mail’s proposals would increase the cost of missed appointments, which already exceeds £1 billion.
The letter said: “Preliminary Healthwatch data shows that more than 2 million people may have missed medical appointments in 2022-2023 due to late delivery of letters, and this will only worsen under the proposed new plans.”
The health leaders added that a solution must be found to prioritize the huge volume of correspondence sent by NHS teams and ease the disruption to healthcare staff and other patients, “otherwise more people will miss time-critical appointments, appointment changes or vital missing test results. ”.
New data shows that late letters are responsible for 25% of missed hospital appointments. A range of NHS letters, including crucial appointments, treatment plans and test results, rely on second-class stamps.
Late letters are putting further pressure on NHS waiting lists, which number as many as 9.7 million people, according to Office for National Statistics data released this week.
Sir Julian Hartley, the CEO of NHS Providers, told the Telegraph the proposed delays were “extremely useless”.
“It is very important that patients are kept informed of developments in their care and treatment as quickly as possible,” he said.
“An efficient, punctual postal service remains an important part of that process. At a time when far too many patients are already facing long delays – the last thing any trust leader wants – anything that adds to that uncertainty and potentially the deterioration of conditions would be extremely futile.
Jacob Lant, the chief executive of healthcare organization National Voices, said: “The proposals being consulted on risk further delaying vital communications and exacerbating digital exclusion, unfairly increasing health inequalities. NHS mail must remain a priority service.”
A Royal Mail spokesperson told the Telegraph that the service was “committed to working with a range of NHS agencies to explore options that could provide greater reliability for time-sensitive medical letters”.
He added: “The NHS is complex, made up of hundreds of different trusts and thousands of GPs and other services, each with different requirements. Going forward, we will continue to offer them a choice of service levels and prices to suit the different priorities of each part of the organization.”
The postal regulator, Ofcom, has come up with a range of options for the postal service. This includes shortening service days from six to three days and a more expensive service for next-day deliveries. Ofcom is expected to continue discussing the proposals with the industry and publish an update in the summer.
The Royal Mail has been contacted for comment.