Routine care in GP surgeries and hospitals should be paused to focus on vaccines, NHS England was told last night.
Hip replacements, face-to-face GP appointments and other non-urgent care is being postponed until the new year to prioritise an “all-out drive” to use boosters to protect against the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
Patient groups warned that the drive for vaccination could lead to missed cancer cases despite promises that urgent checks would be maintained.
Sajid Javid, the health secretary, acknowledged that “our national mission [on vaccination] comes with some difficult trade-offs” as staff were taken away from other services.
He told the Commons: “For the next two weeks, all primary care services will focus on urgent clinical need and vaccines, and some non-urgent appointments and elective surgeries may be postponed until the new year while we prioritise getting people the booster. I’m convinced that if we don’t prioritise the booster, the health consequences will be far more grave in the months that lie ahead.”
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In earlier interviews Javid said that people had “probably been waiting a long time” for treatment such as hip and knee replacements but “the hospital concerned would have the right to postpone it if it meant they would get a lot more booster jabs done”.
He also put his drive for more in-person doctors’ appointments on the backburner, saying: “The face-to-face appointment that is the most important with any GP is while you’re getting jabbed.” Javid said that cancer checks should be “completely unaffected” and urgent care would continue as normal. It “should not be the case” that anyone died for lack of treatment, he added.
Professor Steve Powis, the medical director of NHS England, said: “In line with government’s request to focus maximum resource on getting jabs into arms, it’s vital too that people continue to come forward for urgent care and also for potentially life-saving checks for major conditions like cancer.”
However, Minesh Patel, of Macmillan Cancer Support, said: “While it’s vital everybody receives their Covid-19 booster, using GP capacity to help with this, at a time when access to GP appointments was already under huge pressure, may have unintended consequences for cancer diagnoses. This is concerning when we know there are already nearly 50,000 patients ‘missing’ a cancer diagnosis in the UK and catching cancer early is so vital in ensuring the best possible outcome for patients.”
Patel said it was “crucial that people continue to contact their GP if they have symptoms that could be cancer and that all concerns about cancer are treated as urgently required appointments”.
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Charlotte Augst, head of the patient charity National Voices, said: “People are still ill with things other than Covid. It is not feasible for the NHS to do nothing but vaccines.”
In a letter to NHS leaders, Amanda Pritchard, head of NHS England, told them to “clinically prioritise your services to free up maximum capacity to support the vaccination programme”.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said that ministers had to be “absolutely clear” about the knock-on effects of the vaccine drive. Citing Javid’s recent push for GPs to do more in-person appointments, he said: “It’s only a few weeks since politicians were indulging in attacking members of the primary care team for the fact that they weren’t always able to offer face-to-face appointments.”
