This winter the pressure facing the health service caused Norfolk’s NHS to declare a “critical incident” through most of January - but what has this meant for patients?
Norfolk’s hospitals racked up a litany of missed targets for ambulance handover times, cancer treatment speed, and procedures carried out through December, as massive staff shortages due to the Omicron surge meant supply could not keep pace with demand.
But perhaps the most long-lasting consequence is that the region’s biggest hospital, the Norfolk and Norwich (NNUH) has fallen behind its own plans to care for patients who have been waiting in pain for more than two years.
It even looks on course to miss a major national government deadline which has already been pushed back.
In October 2020, then-81-year-old Noel Barratt’s hernia symptoms became so severe he had to call an ambulance, but today after another 16 months of pain, worry and discomfort he has still only had scans and delays.
The retired businessman, from Norwich, said: “The hernia had been there for two or three years but, what with my wife getting dementia and all the work I had to do looking after her, the pain got extremely bad.”
The NNUH told him he would be scheduled for surgery at the James Paget University Hospital (JPUH) in Gorleston, but since then he has been waiting and waiting.
He had a scan at the JPUH in July, but months afterwards, having heard nothing, he asked for results from his GP only to be told they had no records of the scan. He said: “It took another two months for the results to come through.
“I had a video consultation with a surgeon in December, he said he had reviewed the CT scan and it showed nothing sinister, so he said he’d see me in three months.”
The condition is both chronic and worrisome.
Mr Barratt went on: “It does hurt at times, it hurts when I pick things up, when I bend over, but the bigger thing is, it’s getting worse all the time, there’s a hole in my insides that’s gradually getting stretched and the bowel is poking through.
“They don’t repair themselves, hernias. It’s just getting worse and that increases my chances of it being strangulated - and that is life threatening.”
Data reveals the number of patients waiting for more than two years has risen sharply. In April 2021 there were 92 people in Norfolk who had been waiting more than two years for treatment at either the NNUH, the Queen Elizabeth or the James Paget, of which 86 were on the NNUH’s waiting lists.
By December that figure was 1,557, 1478 of whom are waiting for treatment at the NNUH.
But the winter crisis meant that even the hospital’s efforts to make headway into that number fell behind pace - due to staff sickness.
So as of mid-January there were still nearly 3000 people waiting two years or more, against the hospital’s target of around 2500.
A national target of eliminating the number of patients waiting for two years has been pushed back from March this year to July but based on its current projections, the NNUH won’t clear its two-year backlog until late this summer.
It comes after health secretary Sajid Javid announced the government’s Elective Recovery Plan, which sets targets for how quickly hospitals should get through their patient backlogs.
Before the pandemic, the NHS waiting list stood at more than four million - but this has spiralled to six million - and 111,000 in Norfolk - with countless operations cancelled in 2020 and 2021 while hospitals focused on Covid.
More than 300,000 patients nationwide have waited at least a year for tests and treatment - 13,800 of them in Norfolk.
An extra £36 billion is being pumped into health and social care over the next three years though an unprecedented national insurance hike of 1.25 per cent, with money from the first year of the increase ringfenced for the NHS.
An NHS spokesman said work in Norfolk to tackle waits included two new children’s theatres at the NNUH due to open this summer, the North Norfolk Macmillan Cancer Centre which opened late last year and plans for a new £11m Orthopaedic Centre.
The James Paget will open a new operating theatre in April and install a new MRI machine in the summer.
In a service-wide statement on behalf of the NHS in Norfolk and Waveney a spokesman said the national plan to address waiting lists “will involve increasing health service capacity, prioritising diagnosis and treatment, transforming how elective care is provided and providing more information and support to patients".
They added: “The NHS in Norfolk and Waveney is committed to tackling the longest waits, whilst ensuring those in the greatest clinical need get the treatment they need, as quick as possible.”
What is in the government's Elective Recovery Plan?
- Two-year waits to be eradicated by July 2022
- 18-month waits to be eradicated by April 2023
- One-year waits to be eradicated by March 2025
- 9m more checks and tests by march 2025
- 75 per cent of urgent cancer referrals diagnosed or ruled out within 28 days by March 2024
- 95 per cent of patients to receive a diagnostic test within six weeks by March 2025
* all targets depend on maintaining "low levels" of Covid.
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