Millions of patients are currently on tenterhooks, often in agony, hoping the NHS will find time to treat them. In my local hospital trust alone, there are 100,000 people stuck in this limbo, with 8,000 of them waiting for more than a year to date. The backlog for operations has reached an all-time high, with Covid making an already difficult situation impossible. Those patients expecting surgery may be shocked by how the current system could encourage those who treat them to see pound signs rather than patients.
During the pandemic, the government has poured funding into private healthcare firms, nominally to relieve pressure on overstretched NHS hospitals. The kind of spending that was once deployed for cataracts and hip operations is now being used routinely to deliver cancer and cardiology care.
