Almost half of all NHS patients waiting over two years for treatment live in one health board area
Alec Doyle, local democracy reporter
Almost half of all NHS patients in Wales waiting over two years for treatment live in the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB) area, according to the latest figures.
And while long-term waiting lists are stabilising – with ambitions plans to halve them in the next five months – overall waiting lists continue to grow.
Across the country there are around 24,000 NHS Wales patients waiting for more than two years for treatment, with 10,329 of them living in Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Anglesey.
The number of patients on the BCUHB extreme long waiting list – three years or more – has fallen since July from 1,807 to 1,491, while the number of patients waiting two years or more has stabilised over the same period.
Cash injection
That was thanks in part to a £7.3m injection of cash from the Welsh Government to tackle extreme waiting times.
Now Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board’s Director of Performance and Commissioning, Stephen Powell, has pledged that by April next year the two-year waiting list will be cut to around 5,000.
“We’ve given a commitment to reduce the number of patients waiting more than two years to get that number down to about 5,000 by the end of this current financial year,” he said.
“We’ve had additional funds from the Welsh Government to facilitate that and we’ve stepped-up oversight and assistance through additional insourcing, outsourcing and commissioning on a daily basis to ensure we are moving in the right direction.”
Undermining progress
But independent board member and barrister Chris Field said that waiting times increasing in other areas was undermining the progress made.
“You might well get an appointment within 100-and-something weeks but then you may have to wait the same amount of time, if not longer, to be seen again,” he said.
“It’s nonsense. We are at the bottom of the heap. Why should we expect the population to be anything other than indignant. We’re telling them all the time it’s terrible but it’s not actually getting better, objectively it’s getting worse.”
Interim Executive Director of Finance Russell Caldicott insisted that on extreme waiting the board was making real progress.
“Waiting times were going in the wrong direction only four or five months ago,” he said. “We’ve stemmed that tide and effectively the gradient for all the graphs on extreme waiting times are on a significant downward trend.”
Mr Powell agreed that the current state of affairs was unacceptable, but that the board was making progress with the patients who have been waiting longest.
“At the moment we have to concentrate on the extreme long waiting lists because those patients have waited so long,” he said. “Equally at the other end we’ve got an increasing number of patients coming onto the waiting lists as well.
“The number of patients waiting more than 50 weeks is going up and it will continue to go up. This is a long term project to stabilise the whole of the waiting list because we’ve got to get the whole thing back down to 36 weeks or under.
“It’ll take a number of years but we’ve got to treat the extreme long waiters, your urgent patients and suspected cancer patients, then gradually push the whole of the waiting list back down. But it is unacceptable.
“It’s a complicated situation and will take a while. There’s no doubt our extreme long waiting times are coming down. We need to find ways – through service planning, demand and capacity planning efficiency and effective use of resources at all levels – to get all waiting times down.
“It’s an enormous challenge. The health board is in the situation it is in and it’s going to take time to fix.”
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If you offer to pay privately the two and a half year waiting disappears like magic. Without a NHS waiting list there would be no private work for consultants. Think about it!!
Plenty of grounds for suspecting that “professionals” in NHS saw this as a golden opportunity 10 or more years ago and slowly escalated the crisis aided and abetted by the neglect of so many patients who pay no attention to keeping well until it’s too late.
I cannot get an appointment to see my doctor on NHS but she happily offers apointments this week at £150 a go in private premises. This two tier system should be banned. Either work privately ir for thr NHS. Private work obviously is unable to give my doc the £100000 salary NHS supplies, just gives her a top up.
Answer is to fund treatment where appropriate (and for those willing to travel ) in a European hospital or clinic. That would remove the incentive for rent seeking by UK consultants.
You’re on the right track except funding has been cut in real terms by Whitehall to push more people into the private sector for ideological reasons. When the English administration spends less in England, Barnett means Wales is forced to do the same.
This waiting lists have been rigged , there is no question of that. Few years ago I was contacted by Hospital for the waiting list I was on after questioning I was kept on the list. But I later found out that the list had been manipulated moving me off the urgent waiting list to secondary list, all a result of the questions by a clerk . On a second referral , I’ve recently been seen in a clinic after waiting 3 years 3 months only to be told yes you need treatment but I’ll have to wait 5 or… Read more »
Presumably this health board covers an older population due to the high number of migrants retirees. Is their funding from Cardiff Bay needs-based or per capita which doesn’t reflect the much higher costs associated with treating older people. Is the same problem affecting Wales within the UK also happening within Wales?
Ah, you are now entering “heresy” territory. Anyone who mentions the in-migration of a more risky demographic gets attacked from all sides for being xenophobic, denying our status as a nation of sanctuary ! Truth hurts.
It wouldn’t matter if it was properly funded. But are boomers a “more risky demographic”? That’s an interesting question.
If Welsh health services were properly funded then very little would matter but that is not the case. Migration of older people is an issue in some areas just as loss of young people is an issue in others. We have become a lopsided relatively high dependency population.
There’s two sides to “properly funded”. There’s the total amount available for health, and then there’s how that’s divvied up. If the health board with the oldest population has the longest waiting lists without any other reasonable explanation then this divvying up probably isn’t happening according to need.
Does this list cover the of people who live in Wales but are on hospital waiting lists in England because there are no convenient Welsh hospitals in their locality?
Does this list cover the people who live in England but are on hospital waiting lists in Wales because there are no convenient English hospitals in their locality?