600 Surrey patients waiting longer than a year for hospital treatment
Around 600 patients of Surrey Heartlands have been waiting more than a year for hospital treatment.
Surrey County Council’s adults and health select committee also heard today (October 20) that Surrey Heartlands has the fewest patients waiting over 52 weeks out of all 106 clinical commissioning groups in England.
Before the pandemic however there were fewer than ten Surrey Heartlands patients having to wait this length of time.
And though staff are working hard to reduce this – in March this year it reached a peak of 2,300 – they are warning waits for planned surgery may increase again if people do not follow Covid precautions in a current surge in cases.
New cases in Surrey this week have increased by a quarter compared with last week.
January is expected to be a “particularly challenging” period for numbers of patients in intensive therapy units.
Helen Coe, Surrey Heartlands Integrated Care System’s director of recovery and transformation, said they are ready for a surge – though it was still possible planned operations may have to be sacrificed.
She said: “We’re really focusing on training staff and what we will have to do, or may have to do, as a result of it is step down some of our other services like elective surgery.
“But we won’t do that unless it’s absolutely essential because we appreciate that people have waited a long time for operations and we’re actually focusing on clearing that backlog as well.”
She added: “As we go into the winter we know how many patients we’ve been able to nurse within critical care and we’ve almost doubled the number of beds that we’ve been able to staff.
“We’ve done that by training up some of our staff in some of our high dependency areas to be able to look after critical care patients.”
She said they were capable of going up to a further 12 beds on top of their current bed stock.
County councillors were told many systems in England had patients waiting over two years for planned care, but Surrey Heartlands was proud to have no patients waiting that long.
Some elective surgeries had been done by the private sector to take pressure off NHS acute care during the pandemic and this would continue.
The target treatment time is within 18 weeks. Based on data for Ashford & St Peters, Royal Surrey and Surrey & Sussex Hospitals, the number waiting longer than this reduced from a peak of 28,000 in July 2020 to 17,000 in July 2021. Surrey Heartlands’ aim is to return to pre-Covid levels of around 8,500.
But coronavirus cases in the UK are at their highest level for months and Surrey is no different, with 6,093 new cases in week ending October 16, a 25 per cent rise on the previous week. This compares with 1,601 new cases in the county at the start of July.
Dr Charlotte Canniff, clinical chair of Surrey Heartlands Clinical Commissioning Group, said there was “a sudden increase in acute infectious presentations” generally “following the release of lockdown and schools going back and people returning to face-to-face work”.
Ms Coe said it was important to reinforce the importance of wearing masks, social distancing and keeping good hand hygiene.
Being double vaccinated alone was not always enough to keep people out of hospital.
She said: “Whereas previously patients in a hospital environment were people who weren’t vaccinated, we are actually seeing people being admitted to an acute environment that have been double vaccinated.”
The good news is that there are enough booster jabs to go round.
Fiona Slevin-Brown is executive lead for urgent and emergency care at Frimley Health and Care but spoke for all of Surrey when she said there are sufficient supplies of booster vaccines, despite a small delay in arrival.