Royal Cornwall Hospital waiting lists have doubled in the past 13 years

The size of waiting lists at Cornwall’s main hospital has doubled in the last 13 years. In April this year, there were a total of 43,266 people on Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust waiting lists.

This is up from 21,713 in April 2011. Much of this has come since the pandemic, however. The size of the waiting list increased to 26,762 in February 2020 and was only 27,397 by April 2021.

After that, it rose rapidly to 39,871 by April 2022 and peaked at 48,732 in May 2023. The situation in our region is different from the country as a whole, which saw higher increases during the austerity years of conservative government.

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There were a total of 7.57 million people on NHS waiting lists in England in April, up from 7.54 million in March. Since 2011, however, its number has more than tripled.

There were 2.51 million people on waiting lists in April 2011, the earliest we have reliable figures for and a year into the Tory-led coalition government. They rose steadily to 4.57 million just before the pandemic in 2020, nearly double what they had been nine years earlier. Following the pandemic, they rose much more sharply to current levels.

Waiting lists are not the only thing that has been on an upward trajectory within the NHS. The proportion of people attending type 1 A&E who had to wait more than four hours from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge also increased.

Just 7.7% of attendances at main A&Es in June 2015 saw the patient wait longer than four hours. By February 2020, this had risen to 27.0 percent.

Like waiting lists, this has increased further following the pandemic and currently stands at 40.3% of patients. At Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, the proportion of attendances waiting more than four hours at Type 1 A&E increased from 18.8% in June 2015 to 60.1% in April 2024. The number of people waiting more than 12 hours to be boarding increased from none. at 476 during that time.

A spokesman for Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust said: “We recognize that people are waiting longer than we would like and our staff are working tirelessly to reduce waits for emergency and planned care.”

An NHS spokesman said: “As the latest figures show, demand for NHS services across the country remains high – May was a record month for A&E services, with the highest number of attendances to A&E and the busiest may for the most urgent ambulance call. -exits, while staff delivered a record number of elective appointments for the month of April.

“The NHS continues to focus on reducing long waiting times for routine care and reducing the time patients spend in A&E. Thanks to the dedication of staff and a range of measures in the UEC recovery plan to improve patient care – including higher utilisation. of emergency care on the same day and achieving our target of providing 5,000 additional core hospital beds – 20% more patients were seen in A&E within four hours in May compared to the same month last year.

In April, CornwallLive reported that the Royal Cornwall Hospital completed more planned operations and treatments last year than before the pandemic – but people were waiting longer on average. A trust spokesman said at the time: “In many specialties we are exceeding national targets, but we know we have others, such as orthopedics, where demand is high and we need to do much more. Through the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Integrated Care Board, we offer patients a choice of alternative providers.

“We have worked with GP practices to deliver treatment across multiple locations and later this year we will be opening a new surgical center in St Austell in collaboration with the Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, providing a further increase in capacity to do more surgeries and still. reducing waiting times.”

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