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Wales Online: Wales’ creaking NHS hits grim milestone as troubles grow

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This article was written by Ruth Mosalski for Wales Online. Published September 20, 2024. To access the original article, click here.

The number of people waiting for an appointment with a hospital consultant in Wales has hit nearly 800,000 as the waiting lists crisis in the nation escalates. That worrying indicator of the depth of the problems facing the nation’s NHS has grown consistently over the last decade.

Wales’ health minister Jeremy Miles, who has just been appointed to the role in Frist Minister Eluned Morgan’s cabinet, said that the rise in the waiting lists was just one of the indicators published this week which showed a “mixed picture” of the NHS in Wales. He said A&E waits were falling as were ambulance response times but that waiting times were “not where we want them to be”.

The Royal College of Surgeons said that waiting lists “must be the priority”. Wales director Jon Barry said: “With waits for treatment in Wales reaching another record high, surgeons are increasingly concerned about the disruption long waits are causing to patients’ lives, and the risk that they may deteriorate while waiting.”

The data published by the Welsh Government on Thursday show that there are now 796,631 open referrals from doctors to hospitals where people are waiting for an appointment for further treatment. These are figures for referrals. Some people are waiting for appointments for more than one problem and there are 616,700 individuals on waiting lists for at least one treatment, another record.

Of these referrals, 441,350 have been waiting for less than 26 weeks (six months), 79,328 have been waiting up to 36 months and 275,953 have been waiting over that nine-month benchmark.

Ambulance response times saw the best monthly performance in a year, with 51.8% of “red” life-threatening calls arriving within eight minutes. But only 55% of newly-diagnosed cancer patients started treatment within 62 days of the disease being suspected, the worst for three months.

Prof Barry of the Royal College of Surgeons said: “As Jeremy Miles takes on the health brief, he can make a lasting change to NHS waits in Wales. He must make boosting surgical capacity in Wales his absolute priority. This includes investing in staff and speeding up the roll-out of surgical hubs, which separate out planned and emergency care, so essential operations can go ahead.”

This week the University Hospital of Wales asked people to “only attend in an emergency” due to a “huge spike in attendances” and Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board said on Monday that the emergency department was extremely busy and “only the most seriously injured or ill will be prioritised.”. One senior emergency physician has described the waits people are facing as “dreadful” and said he is worried what the current situation will mean when the winter spike comes once the weather worsens.

Mr Miles said: “There are targets where we are doing better, so long A&E waits, ambulance response times for the most urgent calls. We are providing treatment to more cancer patients than any other month but one, so there’s improvements across the system but obviously the waiting times overall are not where we want them to be. It’s a mixed picture.”

He said performance data has today been published for the first time so people can compare health boards. That will, he says, allow him to promote good practice to those not performing. “Every health board is doing well in some areas and less well in others, if we were in a situation where the best performances were being mirrored right across all health boards we’d be making substantial progress against our targets”.

Asked how quickly he thinks he can make changes, he said: “I want to see progress happening quickly but this is a steep challenge. The point of making this one of the small number of overriding priorities for the government is to allow the reprioritisation to happen so that can bring further resource and focus on this as a priority.”

He added: “With waits we’ve seen good progress against longest waits over the last two years, but what’s disappointing is that over the last three or four months that progress hasn’t continued. The average wait for people in Wales is 22 weeks, we’ve got about 3% of people waiting over two years, we’ve got to get that number down because we don’t want people waiting in pain or discomfort for care”.

Asked about the two health boards this week saying they were overwhelmed, Mr Miles said there is “incredible pressure on the system”. Asked why there had been such a spike this week, he said: “There is pressure in the system and that happens throughout the year and happens for a number of reasons”.

Dr Rob Perry, Royal College of Emergency Medicine Vice President Wales, has today warned: “As well as waits for elective care there must be a strategy to address the dreadful long waits experienced on a daily basis in Emergency Departments. Just this week we have seen at least two health boards issuing warnings about being overwhelmed.

“August’s performance figures speak for themselves and it seems the situation has worsened since then. As an emergency physician the scenes we see are unacceptable, it is simply not fair for people to endure these long waits. If we are experiencing that level of demand already – in what were traditionally considered the quieter months – it is hard to comprehend what it will be like when the inevitable winter spike comes in a few short months.”

 

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