Health service waiting list will grow despite funds

Waiting lists for treatment on the National Health Service, or NHS, in England will continue to grow for two more years despite new government policies designed to reduce the backlog, partly caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a statement to Parliament, Health Secretary Sajid Javid announced the government's Elective Recovery Plan to try and reduce the backlog, which already stands at a record 6 million patients.

It is possible the backlog could rise to 14 million, despite an imminent tax rise designed to pump funds into the service, according to a bleak government assessment, noted the Financial Times.

Javid said April's national insurance tax increase will raise 12 billion pounds ($16.25 billion) a year to help hospitals clear the waiting lists, reported the BBC.

He told politicians that up to 10 million fewer people than expected had come forward for treatment during the pandemic and warned that the number of people on waiting lists will "sadly, continue rising before it falls".

Javid said waiting lists would lengthen and not start to fall until March 2024 regardless of investment. He said this was because those who stayed away from the health service during the pandemic are now returning for procedures, scans and consultations.

The BBC reported that the health service has been allowed to retain a 2025 deadline for dealing with the 300,000 patients waiting more than a year for treatment. Backbench Conservative Party members of Parliament were critical of the plan and warned Javid that the targets are not ambitious enough.

A Treasury source told the Daily Mail that the NHS recovery targets had been "watered down". The source said: "We take the pain of raising the money for them and we end up with a plan that is much more pessimistic than we thought we had agreed."

The paper reported that NHS efforts to reduce the backlog will include sending patients across the country for surgery if their local hospital is too busy.

It said operations will be "fast-tracked" by surgeons performing the same procedures all day long at new "surgical hubs", and more private hospitals will be used for NHS operations. There are also plans for diagnostic hubs for tests to be established in shopping centers.

Labour's shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, told Javid the plan "falls seriously short of the scale of the challenge facing the NHS and the misery that is affecting millions of people, stuck on record-high NHS waiting lists".

Streeting claimed much of the backlog was not caused by the pandemic but by "years of underfunding of the NHS and failure to tackle the health service's understaffing".