Pooling hospital waiting lists could help hospital ‘restarts’

The Nuffield Trust has said that pooling hospital waiting lists, strictly segregating patients and a complete reconfiguration of departments could be required to restart routine NHS activity.

Nigel Edwards, chief executive of the Nuffield Trust, argued that every patient who comes to hospital will now need to be treated as a potential infection risk and the layout of accident and emergency departments must be completely changed to accommodate social distancing guidelines.

However, such adaptations, which would ‘slow the pace with which the NHS has traditionally treated patients’, could affect the capacity of healthcare services, possibly by more than a third.

Hospitals suspended routine procedures in March to deal with the coronavirus crisis, and health leaders all agree that the challenge is now how to deal with the enormous backlog that has built up, as well as manage a likely uptick in demand as those who avoided seeking care due to worries about the virus do start to use services again.

Speaking at an online discussion organised by the Royal Society of Medicine, Edwards suggested that hospitals will need to ‘pool’ waiting lists over whole areas, balancing capacity and need, adding that tough decisions will need to be made on the criteria for prioritisation.