Lite innblikk i backloggen på elective treatments i UK:
Get ready for queues - The mystery at the heart of the NHS
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Lots of this sort of surgery stopped last year. Now theatres are deep-cleaned between procedures, and patients must isolate and take a covid-19 test before arriving. The result is an enormous backlog. Across England, and in all specialisms, more than 5.1m operations are waiting to be carried out, the longest list since records began. And the waits are increasingly lengthy: nearly 400,000 of these operations have been planned for more than a year, up from 1,500-odd before the pandemic.
These numbers tell only part of the story. Some 4.6m fewer people completed elective treatment in 2020 than in the year before, as patients avoided their general practitioners and hospitals shut to all but the most unwell. The trend has not abated this year (see chart). Nobody knows when, or in what condition and numbers, these missing patients will eventually show up. But a year without treatment is certain to have taken a toll.
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“The hardest thing to explain is that [waiting lists] will keep going up.” Sajid Javid, the new secretary of state for health and social care, has started preparing the ground, warning in an article for the Mail on Sunday that the backlog is “going to get far worse before it gets better”.
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One requirement will be to increase capacity. England has fewer ct or mri scanners per person than any other European country, for example, so money has been set aside for 44 new community diagnostic hubs in the next financial year. That should free up equipment for patients in hospitals. Extra covid-19 funding is enabling hospitals to recruit local private providers. But the hope is that the health service can become more efficient, too.