The UK’s health and social care secretary Sajid Javid has commented on delays faced by NHS England in the face of tackling patient waiting-list backlogs.
A record six million patients are on hospital waiting lists for non-urgent operations or procedures in England, as of November 2021. The need to suspend routine surgeries at times during the pandemic increased existing pressures on the health service.
Details of the NHS England scheme were expected to be published today, but the health secretary has said that they would be published “soon”.
This follows a last-minute hold placed by Whitehall on NHS plans to address the to provision of healthcare for those with unmet medical needs due to the continuing backlog.
The government has, however, revealed a new online service that allows people in need of non-urgent surgery or procedures to access information about NHS waiting times.
In an interview with BBC Breakfast, Javid explained that the full plan had originally been scheduled for release in early December, but due to the emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron coronavirus subvariant, focus was shifted to providing an efficient roll-out of the booster jab programme.
On behalf of the government, a spokesperson said: “We are united in our plan to clear the NHS’s record backlog as we recover from the pandemic.”
Javid said that the number of patients on these hospital waiting lists would increase before beginning to fall, as an estimated eight to nine million people had stayed away from hospitals during the pandemic, although he also added it was difficult to know exactly how high the numbers would be.
In an interview with the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation – representing the healthcare system – said that an unknown number of patients had not been included in waiting list backlog figures as they had not come forward for their procedure during the pandemic and it had been vital to prioritise people with the most severe need for treatment.
He said that the delay was “frustrating” as the plan had been agreed with leaders from the NHS who “want to get on with the work” and added that “unrealistic” aims could result in “skewing clinical priorities”.