Crisis in emergency care risks plans to tackle backlog

The Health and Social Care Committee’s Report on clearing the backlog caused by the pandemic finds that the elective recovery plans are threatened by pressure on emergency care.

MPs say that, given the record number of 999 calls and waiting times in emergency departments also at record levels, tackling the wider backlog caused by the pandemic is a major and ‘unquantifiable’ challenge. The committee’s report calls for a broad national health and care recovery plan to include mental health, primary care, community care, and social care as well as emergency care.  

The paper stresses that better workforce planning to be a central factor in recovery, but finds that the government resisted changes to the Health and Care Bill that would have required publication of an independent assessment of workforce numbers at least once every two years. Without it, MPs say that it will remain impossible to know whether enough doctors, nurses or care staff are being trained.  

The committee says that a focus on waiting lists, at the highest levels since records began, is understandable but a numerical target driven approach risks jeopardising equally important areas of care that keep people healthy and out of hospital.

Jeremy Hunt, chair of the committee, said: “The NHS faces an unquantifiable challenge in tackling a backlog of cases caused by the pandemic, with 5.8 million patients waiting for planned care and estimates that the figure could double by 2025.

“However, our Report finds that the government’s recovery plans risk being thrown off course by an entirely predictable staffing crisis. The current wave of Omicron is exacerbating the problem, but we already had a serious staffing crisis, with a burnt-out workforce, 93,000 NHS vacancies and no sign of any plan to address this.

“Far from tackling the backlog, the NHS will be able to deliver little more than day to day firefighting unless the government wakes up to the scale of the staffing crisis facing the NHS, and urgently develops a long-term plan to fix the issue.”