It was reported that follow up appointments are to be scrapped and patients moved around the country under extreme strategies to tackle the immense NHS waiting list overload.
The Health Secretary Sajid Javid is understood to have ordered NHS health chiefs to come up with suggestions to alleviate the backlog.
A review will recommend patients who’ve received treatment should have follow-up appointments cut, and alternatively only contact doctors if they encounter problems.
The Government is also said to be considering proposals to speed up non-urgent hospital care through hubs for routine surgery separating it from emergency care.
For those who face long waiting times, the option could also be given to travel further in order to get treated more promptly.
Clearing houses are also being examined for patients who have waited too long for treatment including routine surgery such as knee replacements.
Chris Hopson, the chief executive of NHS Providers, said it was more likely patients would be given appointments in nearby hospitals rather than being told to travel the 230 miles from Durham to Dunstable.
He added many currently come in for checkups every three months for up to a year after surgery, but that in most instances this wasn’t needed.
Chris Hopson said hospital chiefs had a moral responsibility to clear the backlog to ensure patients got the proper care and didn’t spend months on waiting lists.
Waiting lists for routine NHS care in England has snowballed since the start of the pandemic to 5.8 million.
Some 300,000 patients have had to wait more than a year for care, up from just 1,305 before the pandemic started, and 10,000 have waited two years.
Ambulance waiting times are also spiralling as Accident and Emergency beds are filled, leaving many waiting hours to offload severely sick patients.
Health chiefs have branded the ever-growing list unsustainable, while Labour has slammed the dangerously long waiting times for care.
Mr Hopson, who heads up a union representing hospital trusts, said NHS staff understand that the waiting list was not an adequate situation, and he told Times Radio that what they were working on was a really comprehensive strategy to get through those backlogs as quick as possible.
And he said that some of it will be all the traditional things that they do, which was to increase temporary capacity, to ensure that they use overtime as much as possible and to ensure that they use the capacity that sits in the independent sector.
The Government built the Nightingale Hospitals for COVID patients and if they’d used them like they were supposed to, then there wouldn’t have been this kind of overload, and then they decided to dismantle them discreetly.
Come to mention it, I’ve not seen the words ‘Nightingale Hospitals’ for a very long time, but then they probably built them, then realised that they didn’t have enough personnel, so not actually that well thought out, but that’s the Government all over.
But then we have boat people arriving on our shores, accessing our NHS, but if the Government withdrew their access the NHS would be a super service overnight.
And of course, it’s no problem for our Government, they can get a doctors appointment or bed in a private hospital with the click of a finger, but they’re just telling us now that they’re going to cancel appointments out and that everything is hunky-dory, and for those that paid into the tax system out of their hard-earned wages, well if they’re not going to get the service they paid for, then all that money needs refunding.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 