The mounting NHS backlog is “incredibly scary” and risks creating another Mid Staffs scandal, Jeremy Hunt has warned.
The waiting list has hit a record 5.3 million, including 4,000 patients who have been left in the lurch for two years. Health officials fear the list could grow to 13 million as patients come forward.
The “huge pressure” to tackle waiting times could lead to corners being cut and patients being put at risk, the former health secretary said in an interview.
Hunt, chairman of the Commons health and social care select committee, said he feared the drive to cut the backlog could lead to a repeat of the Mid Staffordshire hospitals scandal in which hundreds of patients died needlessly. Some were left so dehydrated they drank water from vases. Doctors admitted they became “immune to the sound of pain”.
“My biggest fear is that we will end up with such huge pressure to reduce waiting lists that we will lose the focus on safety and quality,” Hunt said.
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“The last time we had a huge effort to bring down waiting lists under the Blair/Brown government, we ended up with the unintended consequence of Mid Staffs and Morecambe Bay [when care failures led to the avoidable deaths of 11 babies and a mother] ... because the system was put under enormous pressure to meet targets. Quality and safety and sometimes compassion were thrown out of the window because of the pressure that organisations were put under.
“We have to really make sure that we don’t fall into the same trap this time round. We’ve got to be really careful we don’t sleepwalk into another Mid Staffs.”
Health leaders say the NHS is as stretched as it was at the height of the pandemic in January and things will get worse before they get better. NHS Providers, which represents NHS trusts, is calling on the government to make “the right decisions” over the next month as it finalises NHS funding for the second half of the financial year.
The NHS is going “full speed” to address the backlog in hospital, mental health and community services while enhanced infection control measures cause “significant loss of capacity” in hospitals and thousands of staff are off, either self-isolating or suffering stress and mental health problems of their own.
The biggest concern for Amanda Pritchard, who starts as chief executive of NHS England today, is the waiting list, which is growing longer every month. In addition to the 5.3 million on the official list — the highest since records began in 2007 — many more are likely to need treatment before the end of the year.
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Some 3,927 patients have been waiting two years for treatment compared with 2,722 recorded the month before, according to NHS England. Figures from the NHS GP patient survey show that 42 per cent of patients had put off making an appointment in the past year.
It was not “inevitable” that the waiting list would hit 13 million, Hunt said. “But the problem is that even if it doesn’t, the situation is incredibly scary.”
Hunt, whose committee is to investigate the NHS backlog, said that he believed the only way to cut waiting times was to increase capacity. But the health service would struggle to find enough doctors and nurses because of the “broken system” of NHS workforce planning, he said. Critics will point out that Hunt promised to boost staff numbers when he was health secretary from 2012-18 under Theresa May and then David Cameron.
As well as urgently expanding the workforce, Hunt, 54, said the NHS would have to be prepared to pay more overtime, ask staff to work on Saturdays and increase the use of the private sector.
Crucially, he said, the NHS must learn the lessons of the 2000s, when waiting times were high. “I thought that what the Blair government did on waiting times was very impressive,” he said. “It was definitely the biggest area of public concern on the NHS, and they really did bring down waiting times. That was a big achievement.
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“But there was this terrible unintended consequence, where in large parts of the system, safety and quality got compromised. And a lot of doctors found themselves very ethically challenged by the environment they were working in as a result.” Cancer patients waiting for treatment was a particular concern, Hunt added. “We are already behind France and Germany in cancer survival rates.”
Health policy experts say the backlog could take until 2030 to clear. Robert Ede, head of health and social care at the Policy Exchange think tank, said: “Even optimistic scenarios suggest that the size of the waiting list will approach eight million people by December 2021 and take between five and nine years to be fully addressed.”
