Coronavirus could leave millions waiting for care

The Nuffield Trust has claimed that the number of people waiting for hospital care in England could double to more than eight million within a few months as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

The waiting list in England for people due to have non-urgent care, such as a cataract removal or hip or knee replacement, stood at 4.24 million in March.

Measures that hospitals will have to put in place to tackle the infection as they seek to get back to normal after the pandemic would limit the number of patients who could have a planned operation.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust thinktank, told the Commons Health and Social Care Select Committee: “Given that we are also seeing hospitals having to take beds out to make space, they’ve got staff who can’t work on frontline duties and we haven’t got the testing or PPE really in place to restart elective work as quickly perhaps as one might like, we’ve probably got another couple of months of that restricted activity [over planned operations]. It’s hard to do the mathematics of this but it seems very likely that we’ll have doubled the waiting list to over eight million by the late autumn, I would have thought.”

Edwards also warned that A&E units would struggle to enforce social distancing and therefore not be able to safely go back to having large numbers of people in them. A solution could be that the NHS insist that patients can only come to A&E if they have been referred there by a GP or the 111 telephone advice service, as happens in some countries like the Netherlands.

Only 916,581 people in England attended any kind of A&E unit last month, the fewest since records began in 2010 and 57 per cent down on the April 2019 figure. The number of people admitted to hospital in April as an emergency after attending A&E was also the lowest ever, at 326,581 – 39 per cent down on the 535,236 admitted in April 2019.