The NHS is Wales is not functional and people do not have faith in it, the head of a doctors' union has claimed. Dr Iona Collins, of the British Medical Association in Wales, said that people suffering with chest pain "don't even know" if an ambulance will turn up.
The latest figures from NHS Wales performance data showed that ambulance response times last month were the second worst on record in Wales, with waiting times in emergency departments also having worsened. The figures additionally show that a higher percentage of people are waiting two years or more for treatment in Wales than England. Figures for February show more than 37,000 people are waiting over two years for treatment in Wales, which is around 5% of those waiting. That figure is down from around 60,000 last July - 8% of the total. However, figures for England are much lower and currently stand at 0.014%.
The Welsh Government said it has committed more than £1bn extra worth of funding and is working hard to help the NHS recover from the Covid pandemic.
READ MORE: NHS Wales waiting times: A&E waiting and ambulance response times worsen
Having given up waiting for a hip replacement, one patient will travel to Lithuania for treatment on Monday, paying £10,000 to have the operation privately, BBC Wales reports. Nicky Morris, from Aberaman, Rhondda Cynon Taf, waited 18 months before she saw a consultant.
Mrs Morris, who has a muscle wasting condition, said she called her local hospital, the Royal Glamorgan in Llantrisant, for an update and was told that no orthopaedic operations had been performed there since 2020. When she asked if the hospital would be "catching up" in two years time, she says the person she spoke to could not say whether that would be the case.
Mrs Morris's partner has had to take a loan out on his house in order to pay for the private operation. "It's going to take me five years to pay off this hip replacement, and yet for 35 years I've paid National Insurance, I've paid my taxes. I've never been out of work, never needed the NHS more than I do now," she said.
"If I don't go to Lithuania and I wait for the operation, I've got the potential that my underlying condition will now get to the point where I have no muscle to actually walk. If I'm no longer able to have surgery, that's it. My life will be over at 52," she added.
The Welsh Government has said that it is spending more to help the NHS recover from the pandemic and to cut waiting times. Speaking to BBC Politics Wales, BMA chief Dr Collins said that, despite the fall in numbers Mrs Morris's case was "a symptom of failure".
She said: "We do not have a functioning service now. People do not have faith in the service. If you have chest pain you don't even know if an ambulance is necessarily going to come. We see really tragic reports in the press where people arrive too late."
The Welsh Government published a new strategy to reduce the number of people waiting for an NHS operation in April last year. The first target around outpatient appointments was missed, with the second target to eliminate the number of people waiting more than two years in most specialities by March 2023 also on target to be missed.
On Dr Collins's comments, a Welsh Government spokesperson said: "We are proud of our NHS, the first universal health system of its kind. We have committed more than £1bn extra this Senedd term to help the NHS recover from the pandemic and cut waiting times. We are working with health boards and have set ambitious but realistic targets to tackle the pandemic backlog for planned care, backed by significant extra long-term funding."
Speaking to Politics Wales about the thousands of people waiting more than two years for surgery, Health Minister Eluned Morgan said: "If you look at the percentage drop, in particular, for those longest waits, we're now 47% down on where we were this time last year. Now, we've got a long way to go and what we do know is the way that we count our waiting lists is very different from England."
When asked if the Welsh Government needs to revisit its strategy, Ms Morgan said: "I think it's very important that we set very stretching targets for the health boards. We've galvanised the health boards to really focus on that.
"They haven't gone as quickly as we'd like, they haven't perhaps prioritised in the way that we hoped in terms of the longest waits and we have regular meetings with them to really push them. It took a long time to get started and we're now in a situation where the system is moving through these waiting lists a lot quicker than they were at the start of the process," she added.
Ambulance response times were the second worse on record in March, with response times to "red" calls - those that are immediately life-threatening - slower than the previous month. Only 47.5% of these "red" calls were attended to within eight minutes, failing to meet the 65% target for 32 months in a row.
Ms Morgan said: "I think what we need to recognise is the massive increase that we've seen in terms of demands on the most urgent cases. We've seen a 93% increase in red calls since 2019. 80% of those red calls are answered within 15 minutes. Now, that's not our target.
"It's still not good enough and we still need to do better and that's why we're ploughing money in to the Welsh ambulance service," she added.
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