A woman who has been waiting nearly four years to have various NHS operations says the impact of the delays is “soul-destroying.”
Across England, some 6.1 million people are waiting in hospital, including more than 23,000 who have been waiting more than two years.
For Joe Goulding, who has been living with rheumatoid arthritis since the age of seven, waiting for surgery left her in “agonizing” chronic pain and “relying on painkillers” to cope.
The 49-year-old is on the list for two elbow replacements from 2018, a shoulder replacement from 2019, and there was only a hip replacement that she had been waiting for since 2020, in March.
Due to the long wait, when she was finally seen, she needed more extensive surgery, as the artificial thigh caused problems with her pelvis.
“The pain was eating me from the inside out, nothing took the pain away, and the limitations in my life were destroying my soul,” explained the mother of two.
“I don’t know how I’ve done in the last two years. The most worrying thing is that not only my life, but my family’s life has been affected.”
“My children are only young, aged 9 and 10, and the other day I found my daughter crying because she saw me tremble in pain, knowing that there was nothing she could do to help me,” the civil engineer told the agency. PA.
She said living in chronic pain “sucks the life out of you”, adding that she had to re-mortgage and renovate her home to cope.
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3:49 Fight with hospital waiting time in December
Ms. Goulding believes that patients who have waited the longest are “lost” in numbers and that NHS is “beyond the critical point.”
Dozens have been waiting more than three years for hospital care
This comes as data from the PA show that dozens of people have been waiting at least three years for hospital care in England due to a “shocking” lag in the NHS.
At least nine have waited at least four years for treatment.
One patient, whose data remains anonymous, has been waiting nearly six years for treatment.
Read more: Find an NHS tracking zip code – See how your local trust is presented
Other lagging trusts at the end of January, according to FOI data provided by individual trusts, include a patient waiting seven and a half years (390 weeks) at the NHS Trust in Central and South Essex for gastroenterology.
A quarter of the longest-awaited patients in the 69 trusts that provided data expect trauma care and orthopedic care – which includes hip and knee prostheses.
Four of the longest waiters were waiting for gynecological services and six for urological services.
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NHS executives said they were doing “everything they could” to dig into the gap, but efforts were hampered by pressure on the emergency system, COVID cases and high absenteeism in addition to severe job shortages. force.
The latest official NHS figures in England show that a total of 23,778 people waited more than two years to start routine hospital treatment at the end of January – about nine times more than the 2,608 people who waited more than two years in April 2021
Read more: The waiting time for NHS cancer treatment is record high – how bad are they and why?
Professor Neil Mortensen, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, described the waiting time as “shocking” and warned that it could “cause real emotional and physical stress”.
An NHS spokesman said: “NHS staff are working tirelessly to clear up the accumulations that inevitably accumulated during the pandemic, with local teams using innovative approaches to reduce waiting, such as one-stop shops and super Saturdays as we continue. to see busy emergency services and a large number of hospitalized patients with COVID. “
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