Plea for more cash to sort out huge waiting lists
Surgeons are urging Chancellor to come up with a new deal to tackle ‘mammoth’ waiting lists which they warn now threaten the country’s recovery.
Commenting on reports of an expected extra £3bn for the NHS in this week’s spending review, the Royal College of Surgeons of England urged Rishi Sunak to deploy ‘verve, determination and generosity’ to sort the problem.
Their plea came as latest NHS waiting time figures show:
- Nearly 140,000 patients waiting over 52 weeks in September 2020 – a rise of 107 times compared to September 2019.
- Two in five patients – 1.7m people – waiting over 18 weeks for treatment in September 2020, despite a legal target that 92% should be seen within that time.
- A total waiting list of 4.35m patients
Prof Neil Mortensen
College president Prof Neil Mortensen said: ‘We want to see the Chancellor deploy all the verve, determination and generosity applied to the Covid crisis, to the national effort needed to sort out waiting times.
‘An extra £3bn is really just a stop-gap when you consider the size of the task in hand. It amounts to less than 3% of what the NHS receives in a “normal” year.
‘Covid has exposed years of under-investment in hospitals and the NHS workforce. Only a New Deal for the NHS, with substantial and sustained investment, will get us fighting fit again.’
In a formal submission to the Comprehensive Spending Review process in September, the college urged the Treasury to invest in a national strategy to bring down hospital wait times.
This was echoed by former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt in a letter to Government earlier this month. He said the Health and Social Care Committee that he chairs ‘had no response to our request for a clear strategy to tackle waiting times and the huge backlog of appointments’.