As has been made abundantly clear by the Prime Minister earlier this month, the NHS is suffering from a severe capacity crisis. In addition to emergency departments tackling the toughest winter on record, 7.21 million people are currently on an elective care waiting list and staff shortages are crippling service delivery.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister himself acknowledged that these trends existed prior to Covid-19 but the pandemic has escalated the problem beyond what the NHS is able to tackle without added support. \u201cWith so many people waiting longer and longer for elective care, patients’ conditions are worsening and becoming urgent for some,\u201d reflects Dr Jean Challiner, Medical Director for independent healthcare provider, Medinet.<\/p>\n
Dr Challiner stresses that for Medinet, who have a two decade history of providing dedicated \u2018insourcing\u2019 for NHS trusts to boost capacity, the time patients are spending waiting for treatment is having a drastic impact on their work. \u201cWe used to almost exclusively offer capacity in the NHS for low complexity day cases, but now the priorities within the NHS are very different, and there is a growing need for us to address more urgent and more complex cases.\u201d<\/p>\n
Medinet holds the country\u2019s largest pool of expert clinicians across 20 different specialties, and supplies teams to provide additional clinical capacity to enable hospitals to meet waiting times targets and then work with them to ensure these are not breached. In the last 12 months, 170,000 patients have been seen and treated by Medinet\u2019s clinical teams.<\/p>\n
The fact that Medinet teams work in close conjunction with NHS clinical teams and within existing estates means that they can adapt their service offering to include more complex surgery when needed. This includes cancer surgery and other procedures that fall under the realm of specialised commissioning. Medinet\u2019s large pool of consultants, often made up of part-time NHS doctors or recent retirees, can perform most procedures, although they rarely tackle acute emergency procedures.<\/p>\n
Beyond directly boosting capacity with additional staff, Medinet have looked to enhance NHS efficiency and bring down backlog figures by reducing time to referral for patients. With cataract surgery, (accounting for one of the largest elements of the elective waiting list with 600,000 patients waiting for a procedure)\u00a0patients are now having to wait up to two years to have their cataracts assessed.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are seeing some trusts getting twice as many referrals in certain areas as before and you can\u2019t instantly train the necessary staff to meet this demand in the short term,\u201d says Dr Challiner. \u201cPart of our process is to not only bring in additional direct expert capacity where required but also help enhance overall efficiency or perhaps deploy existing resource differently.\u201d<\/p>\n