The Labour-led Welsh government’s management of the health service has attracted fresh criticism after it emerged that the number of people waiting more than 12 months for an operation in Wales has risen by more than 400% in the past four years.
A freedom of information request by the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) revealed the number of people waiting more than 52 weeks for surgery in the year ending March 2017 was 3,605. In March 2013, the figure was 699.
The number of people waiting more than a year for treatment in England – which has more than 17 times the population of Wales – was 1,302.
Tim Havard, regional director for Wales at the RCS and a consultant general surgeon said: “Long waits for surgery can be traumatising for patients and their families. In some cases patients will be in extreme pain or immobile, possibly unable to work or carry out daily tasks. A patient’s condition can also deteriorate the longer they are made to wait for treatment, meaning the eventual outcomes are not as good as they could have been.”
He acknowledged that overall waiting times longer than 36 weeks in Wales had started to come down over the past couple of years but said the steep increase in the number of those patients waiting longer than a year for treatment was very worrying.
Havard said: “NHS Wales and the government must give renewed focus to policies that will help decrease waiting times. In particular, we’d like to see better provision of out-of-hospital services and more protection of beds used for planned surgery.”
The figures were seized on by Labour’s opponents. The shadow health secretary, Welsh Conservatives’ Angela Burns AM, said: “No one should have to wait more than a year for surgery, but that’s becoming a painful reality for more and more NHS patients in Wales. The longer patients are allowed to languish on waiting lists, the more complex their needs become, and the more expensive their treatment is to minister.”
The Welsh government said the majority of patients were treated within target times despite increased demand on the NHS.
It said that over the past five years referrals to hospital-based services had increased by about 20%. A spokesperson said: “However, we acknowledge some people are still waiting too long for treatment” and added that action plans had been put in place and extra money was being ploughed into the health service to improve waiting times.
