The Welsh Conservatives are calling on the Health Minister to urgently come out with a plan to deal with the NHS waiting list as new figures show, for the first time ever, that 600,000 people are waiting for treatment in Wales.
NHS Wales statistics for June 2021 have also revealed:
- One of the worst A&E waits on record, with the Welsh Government’s flagship new hospital, The Grange in Cwmbran, currently the second worst for emergency delays;
- Those over 85 years of age are waiting nearly six hours to be seen on average; and
- One-in-four patients are waiting over a year for treatment, compared to 1-in-16 for England.
It was also shown that last month, 60.6% of emergency responses to immediately life-threatening calls – or red calls – arrived within the eight-minute target. This is more than 10% lower than in June 2020 and June 2019. It is the 11th consecutive month the target for 65% of ambulances getting to red calls in eight minutes has not been reached.
The worsening situation for patients and NHS staff have led to fears that the Welsh Government’s framework to deal with the backlog over the pandemic published in March has too little detail and is not yet having any significant effect.
Commenting, Shadow Health Minister, Russell George MS, said:
“These numbers are extremely concerning and will only get worse without a plan. Without treatment, people simply cannot go about their daily lives.
“Keeping patients from often life-changing treatment like this when they have already had to live in some form of lockdown or another for over a year is already unacceptable, but not explaining how to address it is negligent.”
The statistics also show how NHS Wales, under the management of Welsh Labour since 1999, is falling behind while progress is being made elsewhere in the UK.
Not only is the proportion of patients waiting over a year for treatment in Wales four times larger than in England, the average waiting time for treatment in Wales, at 23.4 weeks, is more than twice the wait in across the border where it is 10.8 weeks.
Mr George, Member of the Senedd for Montgomeryshire in Powys whose health board was the worst performing for ambulance response times to red calls with only 47% arriving within 8 minutes (down from 53% last month), continued:
“The people of Wales deserve quality healthcare but if they look at our British cousins they will feel short-changed by a Welsh Government that has long underperformed and mismanaged the NHS.
“Its high-time the Minister took on board our calls for expanding the use of rapid diagnostic centres and exploring the introduction of specialist hubs to tackle routine surgery as soon as possible.”
