26
Sep 2024
18-week NHS wait target ‘set to fail’
Health leaders say the government’s plan to tackle the hospital backlog in England will fail without a fundamental reform in how services work.
Labour plans to increase the number of appointments and operations undertaken each week by 40,000, to help hit the 18-week waiting time target. However, NHS Confederation research found that would deliver only around 15 per cent of the additional capacity needed to get back to reaching the target, which has not been hit since 2006.
It called for a wider transformation of hospital care, including greater use of digital technologies to improve productivity.
Data for an upcoming review s expected to show that over 100,000 infants were left waiting for longer than six hours in A&E in England last year, while 800,000 children and young people are on NHS waiting lists for hospital treatments.
Dr Mike McKean, Vice President of Policy at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said that while the review will highlight some issues that apply to adults as well as children, “we have simply got our prioritisation wrong here.
“When you think about diseases that adults get – whether it’s cancers, dementia or cardiovascular diseases – many of them are because of a lifetime of problems and a lot of them start in childhood.
“If you get it right children and families …then we know we will have more robust adults who get less illnesses and diseases.”
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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (jacquelinevance@chadlaw.co.uk), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.
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