Calls for action to tackle waiting times for transgender people in Sheffield
Transgender people in South Yorkshire are having to wait almost a year to get an appointment at Sheffield's gender identity clinic.
A Yorkshire charity says something needs to change to bring waiting times down at Sheffield's gender identity clinic.
Transgender people are having to wait almost a year on average to get an appointment at Porterbrook Clinic - which is one of only seven specialists clinics in the UK.
It's a problem echoed across the country - the average wait for an appointment in Sheffield's now 48 weeks.
Yorkshire transgender charity Mermaid's now calling for an overhaul of the entire system to tackle the issue - Susie Green's their CEO:
"I think the waiting times are going to continue to grow because the clinics have no provision to add those extra people and deal with these extra people so the actual waiting times are going to increase due to the fact that demand is vastly outweighing resource."
"I really do believe that we need to be devolving some of this care to local GPs because it's not rocket-science treating somebody who is trans and if somebody’s been waiting on a waiting list for 2 and a half years then they're still trans. Passing that care onto a GP led model would cause an immediate reduction to the people sat waiting on those lists."
People in Sheffield have been waiting up to 86 weeks to get an appointment at Porterbrook Clinic.
It's all down to a huge increase in demand - the clinic's seen its referrals more than quadruple in the last 5 years.
Susie says the NHS needs to keep up:
"We were seeing a huge upsurge in the numbers of people coming to us so we started putting in place ways to professionalise our charity to make us bigger and better and able to cope with that demand. Now we were doing that 2 and a half years ago, why weren't the NHS?"
"If they're just going to continue with the model that they have, I don't see how they can continue to give the care in the way that they have and deal with the increase in numbers. If they're not going to do something to change the way they deal with people, we're not going to see a reduction in waiting times."
Well the Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust - who run the clinic - say they have recruited more staff to deal with demand but there won't be an immediate change.
A spokesman said:
"We were fortunate to get an increase in funding which means that we are now in a process of recruiting staff. The change will not happen overnight. These are extremely specialist and challenging services, and professionals with experience in the field are very few and far between. This means that the teams around the country are all potentially chasing the same few people. On that basis we are recruiting people who are experienced in a related field and then training them in-house."
"We are not expecting to see a major change in the speed of access for at least 6 months as new staff get to grips with the issues faced by those experiencing gender dysphoria.”