The number of people waiting to start treatment on the NHS has reached 5.9 million, the Health Secretary has said.
Sajid Javid said he expected the number would climb even higher before it started to fall.
“The number of people waiting for elective procedures is around 5.9 million,” Mr Javid told Sky News.
“As I have said, I have been really clear, this number is going to go up before it comes down. Why? Because some seven to eight million people stayed away during the height of the Covid crisis because they were asked to. They did what was asked of them.
“But I want them to come forward, I want them to come back to the NHS, I want them to know that it is open to them, and if you take that along with normal demand of course that is huge pressure.”
Latest official figures released by NHS England show 5.83 million people were waiting to start treatment after being referred as of September.
The Department of Health and Social Care has been asked to clarify if Mr Javid was referring to October’s, as of yet, unpublished waiting list figures.
The number of people waiting to start treatment in March 2020 was 4.24 million, this figure has increased every month since July 2020.
A record number of people are waiting to start treatment on the NHS
Chris Hopson, Chief Executive of NHS Providers said the NHS is under an “unprecedented degree of pressure”.
He told Sky’s Trevor Phillips On Sunday programme: “We are under an unprecedented degree of pressure for this time of year. And what we’re experiencing is very, very high levels of volume of people coming into accident and emergency departments, we know we’ve got the ambulance services under real pressure.
“But wherever you look, Trevor, right the way across the NHS, be it in community services, be it in mental health services, be it in hospitals, the NHS is under an unprecedented degree of pressure for this time of year, and of course that’s before the traditional winter peak.
“We know that the NHS tends to feel most pressure in early to mid-January. So there is a high degree of concern.”
Government not on track to meet GP recruitment target
Mr Javid also admitted the Government is not on track to meet its target of recruiting 6,000 new GPs by 2025.
Boris Johnson pledged to recruit the extra doctors in 2019 and said it would create 50 million more appointments every year.
But Sajid Javid has said the government is “not on course at the moment” to meet the commitment, with less than four years to go.
Asked by Andrew Marr if the Government would hit the target, the Health Secretary said: “We are not on course at the moment. Not for the 6,000. Let’s wait and see where we eventually get to.
“We do have more GPs in general practice. We have, I think in the last two years since we made that commitment, we have almost 2,000 more in general practice.”
He had earlier said: “In the last year we have got over 3,000 more doctors, we have got 9,000 more nurses and that is great, and the number of nurses today we have got in the NHS is the highest number ever. We have got more students in medical school than at any other time in our history.”
The plan to recruit 6,000 more GPs was a 20 per cent increase on the original target and required 500 more GPs to be trained each year.
Earlier this month the Nuffield Trust reported the Government was set to miss the target.
Analysis by the think tank said there were 1,385 extra GPs in England since the 2019 general election, but the number of full time GPs had decreased by 105.
“Although the Government has not yet spelled out exactly how it is measuring its ambition of an additional 6,000 GPs, judging by progress on the number of fully qualified, full-time equivalent GPs, it is fair to say the Government looks set to miss the 2025 target,” Lucina Rolewicz, Nuffield Trust researcher, said.
It comes after the Government announced a £250 million funding boost for GPs to increase capacity this winter.
Doctors were encouraged to use the cash injection to offer walk-in appointments and extend opening hours after patients complained of struggles accessing face to face consultations.
But the Royal College of GPs warned last month the NHS faces a “mass exodus” of GPs due to an ageing workforce, as well as concerns over burnout and increased political scrutiny.
“When GPs are approaching retirement age, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to leave the profession straight away, but against the backdrop of intense workload and workforce pressures, coupled with overbearing scrutiny from some sections of the media and politicians now, it’s an increasingly realistic prospect and a huge concern,” Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the RCGP, told The Guardian.
And people are angry at their GP’s that they can’t be seen immediately. Perhaps this is a major reason as to why.
>Rising levels of GP activity come as newly elected BMA GP committee chair Dr Farah Jameel acknowledged workload pressures as one of the ‘biggest issues’ facing general practice.
>Responding to the latest set of GP appointment data in England, Dr Jameel said: ‘These statistics clearly illustrate that GPs and their teams are continuing to do more and more as they strive to look after patients who need them the most.
>’Last month practices in England delivered more than 4m more appointments than they did in September, a total of 33.9m in October, and more than 3m more than they did in the same month pre-pandemic in 2019. Meanwhile the number of people being seen face-to-face continues to rise, which underlines how wrong suggestions are that practices are closed and not seeing patients in person.
>’What’s not picked up in these statistics though are the reams of other work that GPs and their colleagues do outside of consultations – whether this is following up on referrals, writing letters, assessing test results and managing practices.
>’Couple this with the fact we’re continuing to lose GPs – **we now have the equivalent of more than 1,700 fewer full-time family doctors than we had in 2015** – and the mounting workload is reaching breaking point. Staff are exhausted and demoralised, and there are simply not enough hours in the day to provide safe, quality care to patients.’
I know a couple of people who have had life altering or potentially life saving operations cancelled numerous times at short notice. It’s absolutely heartbreaking for them and their families, and I really feel for the NHS workforce who are doing all they can and more but have been set up to fail for over a decade now by this Tory government.
The lack of GP recruitment leading to a shortage crisis has been talked about as far back as 2014 and probably before that. The Tories have had years to do something about it but they haven’t as with many other issues.
I can only assume Covid is going to make it worse as exhausted GPs want to retire and recent attempts to seemingly deflect blame for a lack of available appointments onto GPs will not have made anything better.
Two years, billions spend in testing and no capacity upgrades. Why?
> the Government is not on track to meet its target of recruiting 6,000 new GPs by 2025.
> the number of full time GPs had decreased by 105
Great work as always.
It doesn’t surprise me. My surgery (which is a group of 3 surgeries in the area) had 6 GPs at the beginning of the pandemic. One has retired and not been replaced and there are another 3 in their 60s which will be due for retirement soon.
Don’t charge medical students tuition fees, and subsidise their living costs (dropouts and course changes dealt with appropriately).
Tie them into a minimum amount of time to be served within the NHS. If they want to pursue private practice, they can buy themselves out and be (appropriately) charged for their training and costs.
Bring all GP surgeries under direct NHS control. Eliminate the ‘internal market’ and targets, and have a nationwide standard of availability per capita (with remote areas taken into consideration)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: recruit more doctors, by providing more medical school places and relaxing their entry requirements.
I’d like to be a GP. I’ve wanted to since I was 13. I designed my teenage years to become a doctor, volunteered, got work experience, chose the right subjects, watched Holby City every week (see, commitment) and did slightly worse in my Chemistry A-level than a medical school would like.
I got a first in my science degree, applied again for grad medicine, no dice because my UKCAT score was only above average rather than well above average.
Now, me and a good few others I know who only ever wanted to become doctors are sat in cityboy jobs, making good money, paying taxes and reading the news to see we’re not training enough doctors as a country and the NHS is on its knees.
Let people train, and they will. Same in any job.
The thing is about a target like that is you need to substantially increase the supply of GPs and you need to it about 8 years before you need to hire them. You need more medical places at universities and more junior doctor positions for training and then maybe you get a new extra doctor out of the process in 8-10 years time. None of that capacity can be built immediately, I suspect the minimum at universities is several years of building work and you probably need more hospital space too, so while you are training these people you need the facilities in which they will be trained and then work. That all has to happen before you really begin to talk about having more doctors. Minimum a decade of significant investment before you see anything out of it.
The only way a pledge just a few years out can be met is with immigration. That was Labour’s plan in the 2000s too, it worked to plug the gap in healthcare the Conservatives had created but it obviously pissed of all the xenophobes and helped bring about Brexit. The Conservatives are standing on reducing immigration too, which is obviously impossible when you keep plugging gaps in our own education and workforce with immigrants from other countries. We are depriving those other countries of their investments, its quite exploitative of other nations.
Even then even if they were investing in all that extra training and facility capacity you still have to fix the environment which has resulted in 1700 doctors leaving. Having the NHS be run into the ground, with pay cuts and other obnoxious penny squeezing consistently its a career that offers a young person less now than it did with increasing costs to pursue it, its worth less than it was so less will do it.
Its clear how this is going to keep going onwards, doctor numbers will fall or be plugged with immigration but our international standing keeps dropping combined with the value of the job so its going to be harder and harder to keep convincing doctors to enter one of the worst funded and treated healthcare systems in the western world.
My GP surgery is all guns blazing and basically pre-pandemic normal… *except* seeing an actual doctor.
You can have all the HCA/nurse appointments you can handle for random things, you will be badgered if you’re late presenting for routine blood tests, you’re due a flu vaccine, we need to check this and that to monitor your Somethingitis, or anything else.
Other than that you’re buggered. They even changed the pre-recorded phone announcement basically saying no F2F appointments and that’s that, off you fuck. But get past that and ask to see a nurse for whatever reason, no problem see you tomorrow morning.
I know, let’s keep wages low and living costs high. That will surely encourage the best and brightest to come to the UK, and prevent the brain drain we have been seeing for the last decade, right?
Yeah I know its the same thing we’ve been doing since the late 00’s but this time it may just work…
Well of course they did. Where are the thousands of nurses they promised? The thousands of policeman they promised after getting rid of 20k coppers. Where are the forty hospitals they promised? I’ll tell you: THEY MADE THEM UP BECAUSE THE TORIES ARE LIARS
13 comments
The number of people waiting to start treatment on the NHS has reached 5.9 million, the Health Secretary has said.
Sajid Javid said he expected the number would climb even higher before it started to fall.
“The number of people waiting for elective procedures is around 5.9 million,” Mr Javid told Sky News.
“As I have said, I have been really clear, this number is going to go up before it comes down. Why? Because some seven to eight million people stayed away during the height of the Covid crisis because they were asked to. They did what was asked of them.
“But I want them to come forward, I want them to come back to the NHS, I want them to know that it is open to them, and if you take that along with normal demand of course that is huge pressure.”
Latest official figures released by NHS England show 5.83 million people were waiting to start treatment after being referred as of September.
The Department of Health and Social Care has been asked to clarify if Mr Javid was referring to October’s, as of yet, unpublished waiting list figures.
The number of people waiting to start treatment in March 2020 was 4.24 million, this figure has increased every month since July 2020.
A record number of people are waiting to start treatment on the NHS
Chris Hopson, Chief Executive of NHS Providers said the NHS is under an “unprecedented degree of pressure”.
He told Sky’s Trevor Phillips On Sunday programme: “We are under an unprecedented degree of pressure for this time of year. And what we’re experiencing is very, very high levels of volume of people coming into accident and emergency departments, we know we’ve got the ambulance services under real pressure.
“But wherever you look, Trevor, right the way across the NHS, be it in community services, be it in mental health services, be it in hospitals, the NHS is under an unprecedented degree of pressure for this time of year, and of course that’s before the traditional winter peak.
“We know that the NHS tends to feel most pressure in early to mid-January. So there is a high degree of concern.”
Government not on track to meet GP recruitment target
Mr Javid also admitted the Government is not on track to meet its target of recruiting 6,000 new GPs by 2025.
Boris Johnson pledged to recruit the extra doctors in 2019 and said it would create 50 million more appointments every year.
But Sajid Javid has said the government is “not on course at the moment” to meet the commitment, with less than four years to go.
Asked by Andrew Marr if the Government would hit the target, the Health Secretary said: “We are not on course at the moment. Not for the 6,000. Let’s wait and see where we eventually get to.
“We do have more GPs in general practice. We have, I think in the last two years since we made that commitment, we have almost 2,000 more in general practice.”
He had earlier said: “In the last year we have got over 3,000 more doctors, we have got 9,000 more nurses and that is great, and the number of nurses today we have got in the NHS is the highest number ever. We have got more students in medical school than at any other time in our history.”
The plan to recruit 6,000 more GPs was a 20 per cent increase on the original target and required 500 more GPs to be trained each year.
Earlier this month the Nuffield Trust reported the Government was set to miss the target.
Analysis by the think tank said there were 1,385 extra GPs in England since the 2019 general election, but the number of full time GPs had decreased by 105.
“Although the Government has not yet spelled out exactly how it is measuring its ambition of an additional 6,000 GPs, judging by progress on the number of fully qualified, full-time equivalent GPs, it is fair to say the Government looks set to miss the 2025 target,” Lucina Rolewicz, Nuffield Trust researcher, said.
It comes after the Government announced a £250 million funding boost for GPs to increase capacity this winter.
Doctors were encouraged to use the cash injection to offer walk-in appointments and extend opening hours after patients complained of struggles accessing face to face consultations.
But the Royal College of GPs warned last month the NHS faces a “mass exodus” of GPs due to an ageing workforce, as well as concerns over burnout and increased political scrutiny.
“When GPs are approaching retirement age, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to leave the profession straight away, but against the backdrop of intense workload and workforce pressures, coupled with overbearing scrutiny from some sections of the media and politicians now, it’s an increasingly realistic prospect and a huge concern,” Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the RCGP, told The Guardian.
And people are angry at their GP’s that they can’t be seen immediately. Perhaps this is a major reason as to why.
>Rising levels of GP activity come as newly elected BMA GP committee chair Dr Farah Jameel acknowledged workload pressures as one of the ‘biggest issues’ facing general practice.
>Responding to the latest set of GP appointment data in England, Dr Jameel said: ‘These statistics clearly illustrate that GPs and their teams are continuing to do more and more as they strive to look after patients who need them the most.
>’Last month practices in England delivered more than 4m more appointments than they did in September, a total of 33.9m in October, and more than 3m more than they did in the same month pre-pandemic in 2019. Meanwhile the number of people being seen face-to-face continues to rise, which underlines how wrong suggestions are that practices are closed and not seeing patients in person.
>’What’s not picked up in these statistics though are the reams of other work that GPs and their colleagues do outside of consultations – whether this is following up on referrals, writing letters, assessing test results and managing practices.
>’Couple this with the fact we’re continuing to lose GPs – **we now have the equivalent of more than 1,700 fewer full-time family doctors than we had in 2015** – and the mounting workload is reaching breaking point. Staff are exhausted and demoralised, and there are simply not enough hours in the day to provide safe, quality care to patients.’
I know a couple of people who have had life altering or potentially life saving operations cancelled numerous times at short notice. It’s absolutely heartbreaking for them and their families, and I really feel for the NHS workforce who are doing all they can and more but have been set up to fail for over a decade now by this Tory government.
The lack of GP recruitment leading to a shortage crisis has been talked about as far back as 2014 and probably before that. The Tories have had years to do something about it but they haven’t as with many other issues.
I can only assume Covid is going to make it worse as exhausted GPs want to retire and recent attempts to seemingly deflect blame for a lack of available appointments onto GPs will not have made anything better.
Two years, billions spend in testing and no capacity upgrades. Why?
> the Government is not on track to meet its target of recruiting 6,000 new GPs by 2025.
> the number of full time GPs had decreased by 105
Great work as always.
It doesn’t surprise me. My surgery (which is a group of 3 surgeries in the area) had 6 GPs at the beginning of the pandemic. One has retired and not been replaced and there are another 3 in their 60s which will be due for retirement soon.
Don’t charge medical students tuition fees, and subsidise their living costs (dropouts and course changes dealt with appropriately).
Tie them into a minimum amount of time to be served within the NHS. If they want to pursue private practice, they can buy themselves out and be (appropriately) charged for their training and costs.
Bring all GP surgeries under direct NHS control. Eliminate the ‘internal market’ and targets, and have a nationwide standard of availability per capita (with remote areas taken into consideration)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: recruit more doctors, by providing more medical school places and relaxing their entry requirements.
I’d like to be a GP. I’ve wanted to since I was 13. I designed my teenage years to become a doctor, volunteered, got work experience, chose the right subjects, watched Holby City every week (see, commitment) and did slightly worse in my Chemistry A-level than a medical school would like.
I got a first in my science degree, applied again for grad medicine, no dice because my UKCAT score was only above average rather than well above average.
Now, me and a good few others I know who only ever wanted to become doctors are sat in cityboy jobs, making good money, paying taxes and reading the news to see we’re not training enough doctors as a country and the NHS is on its knees.
Let people train, and they will. Same in any job.
The thing is about a target like that is you need to substantially increase the supply of GPs and you need to it about 8 years before you need to hire them. You need more medical places at universities and more junior doctor positions for training and then maybe you get a new extra doctor out of the process in 8-10 years time. None of that capacity can be built immediately, I suspect the minimum at universities is several years of building work and you probably need more hospital space too, so while you are training these people you need the facilities in which they will be trained and then work. That all has to happen before you really begin to talk about having more doctors. Minimum a decade of significant investment before you see anything out of it.
The only way a pledge just a few years out can be met is with immigration. That was Labour’s plan in the 2000s too, it worked to plug the gap in healthcare the Conservatives had created but it obviously pissed of all the xenophobes and helped bring about Brexit. The Conservatives are standing on reducing immigration too, which is obviously impossible when you keep plugging gaps in our own education and workforce with immigrants from other countries. We are depriving those other countries of their investments, its quite exploitative of other nations.
Even then even if they were investing in all that extra training and facility capacity you still have to fix the environment which has resulted in 1700 doctors leaving. Having the NHS be run into the ground, with pay cuts and other obnoxious penny squeezing consistently its a career that offers a young person less now than it did with increasing costs to pursue it, its worth less than it was so less will do it.
Its clear how this is going to keep going onwards, doctor numbers will fall or be plugged with immigration but our international standing keeps dropping combined with the value of the job so its going to be harder and harder to keep convincing doctors to enter one of the worst funded and treated healthcare systems in the western world.
My GP surgery is all guns blazing and basically pre-pandemic normal… *except* seeing an actual doctor.
You can have all the HCA/nurse appointments you can handle for random things, you will be badgered if you’re late presenting for routine blood tests, you’re due a flu vaccine, we need to check this and that to monitor your Somethingitis, or anything else.
Other than that you’re buggered. They even changed the pre-recorded phone announcement basically saying no F2F appointments and that’s that, off you fuck. But get past that and ask to see a nurse for whatever reason, no problem see you tomorrow morning.
I know, let’s keep wages low and living costs high. That will surely encourage the best and brightest to come to the UK, and prevent the brain drain we have been seeing for the last decade, right?
Yeah I know its the same thing we’ve been doing since the late 00’s but this time it may just work…
Well of course they did. Where are the thousands of nurses they promised? The thousands of policeman they promised after getting rid of 20k coppers. Where are the forty hospitals they promised? I’ll tell you: THEY MADE THEM UP BECAUSE THE TORIES ARE LIARS