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Dec 2020
Coronavirus – NHS waiting lists will take ‘years’ to recover
Andrew Goodall, chief executive of NHS Wales, has warned that it will take “a number of years” for NHS waiting times in the country to recover to pre-coronavirus levels.
Waiting list figures have grown after the majority of non-urgent treatment was postponed to prepare the NHS for the first coronavirus wave. The service has since been trying to restart non-emergency treatments and aims to keep them going as much as possible during the second wave.
However, despite recent progress, Mr Goodall warned that times could grow even further, adding that there was a “real concern” that hospital doctors were only able to see around 50 per cent as many inpatients and day cases as normal.
Recent data shoed that between the months of March and August, there had been a five-fold increase in the longest waiting times of over 36 weeks.
Dr Goodall added “The overall waiting list has not changed so much, it’s simply patients have been shifted more to the end of the list as we’ve had to prioritise urgent and emergency cases.
“We have made a lot of improvement on waiting times in recent years and it will take us a number of years to recover that and it will take investment and resources also.”
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Posted by Karen Motley, Clinical Negligence Department, Chadwick Lawrence LLP (tonymay@chadlaw.co.uk ), medical negligence lawyers and clinical negligence solicitors in Huddersfield, Leeds, Wakefield and Halifax, West Yorkshire.
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