Nearly 36,000 people are waiting to start treatment, figures from NHS England reveal.
Altogether 12,609 patients have been left waiting over 18 weeks after their referral to treatment, while 1,584 have been waiting over a whole year.
And some York councillors say the government’s new plan to deal with the backlog will do little to alleviate the problem
Cllr Carol Runciman (Lib Dem), executive member for health and adult social care, said: “This Government is failing the thousands in the city and millions across the country who are waiting for treatments and are set to face years-long waiting times for the medical attention they need.
“Patients needed to see an ambitious plan to recruit and train the doctors, nurses and other staff our NHS desperately needs. The plan unveiled this week is inadequate and will no doubt make patients feel quite dispirited.
“This crisis is not simply down to Covid pressures, but is rather caused by years of underfunding of the NHS and failure to tackle the health service’s understaffing, which must be addressed urgently.”
Today (Wednesday) the Health Secretary pledged to recruit 15,000 new health workers by the end of March as the Government warned the NHS waiting list in England will not start to fall for another two years and could even double in size.
Sajid Javid, writing in the Daily Telegraph, said the NHS aimed “to recruit 10,000 more nurses from overseas and 5,000 more healthcare support workers by the end of March” to increase capacity.
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Mr Javid earlier set out in the Commons how the NHS would tackle the backlog built up during the Covid-19 pandemic, including new targets for reducing long waits and getting people checked for illnesses more quickly.
These are among the ambitions:
- the NHS will “eliminate” waits of over 18 months by April 2023, and waits over 65 weeks by March 2024
- waits of longer than a year will end by March 2025.
- no one will wait longer than two years for treatment by this July.
The latest data from NHS England says 35,866 patients in York are waiting to start treatment.
Across England, about six million people are on the NHS waiting list for treatment, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and tests.