It was during a routine eye test in February last year when Andrew Battye, a 68-year-old former NHS worker, first realized something was wrong.
The avid painter had just bought a pair of glasses and took them back because they didn’t seem to work when he discovered that the vision in his left eye had developed a degeneration.
At Harrogate Hospital he was diagnosed with wet age-related macular degeneration, an eye disease that can quickly blur central vision if left untreated. Despite the quick diagnosis, it took almost three weeks before he received his first stabilizing injection. “In those three weeks I lost a lot of vision,” he said.
He was told he needed monthly treatments to keep the condition at bay. But “it’s been nine weeks,” he said. Although most appointments are on schedule, three or four appointments have experienced long delays that can irreversibly affect vision.
“It’s actually a struggle to get your appointment. My last one was supposed to be four weeks and was seven and a half weeks – and we were only able to get one due to a cancellation,” he added.
The services are extensive, meaning there are not enough qualified staff to see him on every visit.
He said: “I only get an injection on two visits and then only go to an optometrist on every third visit to have both eyes checked – essentially waiting three months (between checks) instead of one.
“The hospital says they are trying to recruit people, but they simply don’t have enough for the sheer number of people.”
Battye, who lives with his wife Elizabeth in Selby in North Yorkshire and has two grown-up children, has previously experienced delays on the NHS after waiting nine months for treatment for a basal cell carcinoma. skin cancerwhich would take eight weeks.
He has changed his painting style and become more abstract as a direct result of the delays in his eye treatment.
‘My left eye is actually pretty useless now. I can see things, but everything is distorted. Straight lines become very wavy, in the middle it becomes blurry, and so do the colors – colors become very faint,” he said.
Despite being a former NHS worker himself – “I don’t like talking them down” – Battye is angry about the missed opportunity to protect his eyesight. “You feel frustrated, but you also feel scared, knowing you could lose your sight,” he said.
Nathaniel Dye, a music teacher and jazz musician, knows he waited too long after first experiencing possible signs of colon cancer in the spring of 2022 before seeing his doctor in September.
Once he did, he was shocked by how long it took for the diagnosis to be made – his cancer was already at stage 4 – and treatment to begin.
“After I had a biopsy, I had to wait three weeks for the results. That felt like too long. I was waiting to hear. It should only take a few days or maybe a week because people want to know,” he said.
His oncologist told Dye, 37, that there “wasn’t enough capacity in the system” to process the biopsy faster.
But the delay that worried him most was the 15-week wait after visiting his GP before starting chemotherapy. “That’s way too long. People are shocked when I tell them that. I should have started treatment within a month. But those 15 weeks are a sign of a very tense system. Everyone in the NHS is nice, but chronically overworked.”
He admits his case is ‘ambiguous’ – that quicker diagnosis and treatment may not have improved his chances and prevented the further spread of his cancer, which was later discovered by a scan.
“But could that spread have been prevented if there had been no delays in the NHS? It is not certain that my prognosis would have been as it was if it had not been 15 weeks before chemo started. There is a chance that my cancer could have been nipped in the bud if the NHS had been more efficient, and sooner,” he said.
But Dye is philosophical, not bitter.
‘It’s too late for me. “But I just want to use the time I have left to urge people to go to a doctor if they have any symptoms that could indicate cancer, get examined and demand prompt care,” he said.