Ministers have admitted a key NHS pledge to ensure that everyone who has been waiting at least two years for hospital care would be treated by last month has not been met.
The then health secretary Sajid Javid made the promise in February when launching the NHS’s “elective recovery plan”. It was intended to tackle what is now a record 6.6 million-patient backlog in England for those awaiting a procedure such as a joint replacement or cataract removal and included a series of treatment milestones the health service had to hit.
“No one will wait longer than two years by July,” Javid said. However, the Department of Health and Social Care has now admitted that it will miss that target and that “a small number of patients” will have remained untreated by that deadline.
The health minister Maria Caulfield told Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, in a written parliamentary answer on 18 July that while “no formal estimate has been made … engagement with the National Health Service suggests a small number of patients with complex cases will have waited longer than two years for NHS treatment by the end of July 2022”.
Streeting said the admission was a further example of the government not backing up rhetoric on the NHS with concrete action. “It is unacceptable for anyone to be left waiting more than one year for healthcare, let alone two,” he said. “Once again the Conservatives have overpromised, [and] undelivered, and patients are paying the price.”
In recent months, hospitals have prioritised the treatment of people forced to wait at least two years and reduced the number of patients in that position from 18,600, when Javid made the pledge, to a few thousand.
Saffron Cordery, the interim chief executive of the hospitals group NHS Providers, said the specific complexities of some patients’ conditions, and availability of teams of medical specialists, meant that the July target was likely to be missed.
Javid promised that, as a result of the elective recovery plan, not only would two-year waiters have been dealt with by July but also that all those who had been waiting 18 months would be treated by April 2023 and all waits of at least a year eradicated by March 2025.
However, the director of NHS England’s elective recovery programme, Rob Stone, hinted during a meeting with local health service leaders last month that the pledge covering those waiting 18 months too may also be missed.
The number of patients who have endured 18-month waits has fallen from more than 120,000 last September to 57,000 in May, according to the most recent figure available.
In remarks reported by the Health Service Journal, Stone warned that there were more than 1 million people – “a huge cohort of patients” – that have been waiting at least a year who, unless they were treated soon, would “tip into” the 78-week wait category, quickly sending that total up.
Meanwhile, further evidence emerged on Tuesday showing how growing numbers of patients, frustrated by long delays for NHS care, are choosing to go private.
OCL Vision, a private specialist eyecare provider in London, said it had performed 22% more cataract removals in the last year than the year before after long waits prompted people to “give up on NHS waiting lists”.
“More people are coming through our door as the private sector steps in to reduce the burden on the NHS,” said Romesh Angunawela, an opthalmic surgeon and OCL Vision’s co-founder. Some private clinics can remove cataracts within six weeks, far quicker than the NHS, he added.
