IT COULD take up to three years for waiting times at Dorset County Hospital to return to pre-Covid levels whilst some treatment backlogs are cleared, a senior figure has said.
Most cancer and clinically urgent appointments and procedures have continued to take place at the Dorchester-based hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic, but some patients have had their planned procedure or appointment ‘postponed where clinically appropriate.
Professor Alastair Hutchison, chief medical officer at Dorset County Hospital, commented that there has been a ‘huge effort’ to ease the waiting list for surgeries and is currently planning how to tackle waiting lists in certain departments.
Speaking generally about the pandemic's impact on waiting list times, he said: “For other specialist surgeries that require patients to be admitted to hospital, like knee and hip operations, the waiting lists across the NHS, including Dorset County Hospital, are huge.
“It will take time for it to recover, and we are looking at two to three years to get back to those waiting times before the pandemic.”
He added: “The key is bed space in the hospital because if the patient needs two days in hospital, there is a limit of operations that can be held during a week based on number of beds.
“Traditionally, the NHS would do most of those during summer months when beds were quieter and we get fewer admissions in the accident and emergency department. In the winter, we don’t do many of those because the beds are full.”
The number of people in England waiting to start hospital treatment has risen to a new record high, as figures from NHS England show 4.59 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of January – the highest number since records began in August 2007.
Prof Hutchison was keen to stress that some specialist services, such as X-rays in radiology department, are ‘doing really well in clearing backlogs’ by carrying out extra scans during weekends and evenings. He estimates that it will take approximately two to three months for the waiting list for scans to return to normal.
Likewise with endoscopy appointments, the waiting list is easing and services have been able to continue during lockdown.
People must feel safe to return to hospital, Prof says
Prof Hutchison said that he noted that by the summer, the usual level of services will be back to where it was in 2019, but staff will have to ‘go further than that to clear the backlog'.
One ‘real challenge’ that Dorset County Hospital is set to experience, as well as other hospitals, is people feeling safe to return to hospitals following the pandemic, he said.
He said: “We are now planning how to recover those waiting lists and of course, part of what we need to do is that the public feel comfortable to come to hospital and are safe to come.
“When the vaccination programme continues to vaccinate people, more and more people will be happy to come into hospitals or for any procedure.
“So the confidence for people to come into hospital is an important thing.”
How DCH could reduce backlog
When asked how Dorset County Hospital could chip away at the backlogs, he suggests that the hospital may have to use external facilities or private hospitals to carry out surgeries.
He continued: “You’re looking into a long-term recovery process which will run over at least two to three years.
“That’s going to be really tricky. Other surgeries that will have same sort of difficulties and it will take a lot of time to get back to where we were.
“Where we can utilise other services and provides, we hope we can do surgeries at Winterbourne Hospital and maybe other private providers can help as well.
“But that needs to be worked out in the coming months.”
Prof Hutchison added that hospital staff are constantly reviewing waiting lists for surgeries and prioritising those patients who require surgery urgently. He stressed that ‘those who have waited the longest are the priority to get treated.’
He said: “There is a traditional time-based waiting list but we constantly look out for patients who are urgent and need to be brought in earlier.
“We know we have people on the list who have waiting longer than a year and some of them may wait for another year before getting them in.
“We are trying to prioritise those most urgent ones.”
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