The British health care system has been struggling with enormous backlogs for years. That has rapidly deteriorated in the period after the first lockdowns in the spring. Last week it was announced that as many as 6.7 million Britons are waiting for hospital treatment, or one in eight people in the country.
The new data from the British CBS is worrying. In the past four months, an average of more than 1,000 people more than usual died. This excludes the number of people who died as a result of corona, an average of 500 per week. Normally 10,500 people die every week in England and Wales.
The UK Department of Health will investigate the staggering data. However, a ministry spokesman believes that the rising number of deaths is directly related to curfews in recent years. After all, at that time it became much more difficult, except for the most acute complaints, to visit a general practitioner.
Care postponed
The Daily Telegraph quotes Robert Dingwall, Professor of Health at the University of Nottingham. According to Dingwall, the data matches what he and other doctors warned about in early 2020. “We are starting to see the consequences of delayed or delayed treatment of, for example, cancer and cardiovascular disease.”
According to Dingwall, this delay or postponement has no immediate consequences. “If cancer is not treated immediately, people will not die immediately, but eventually more people will die than would normally be the case.” According to him, the figures from the British CBS are confirmation of this. The same is the case with diabetes, a disease that mainly affects poorer populations. Diabetes will be seen as the leading cause of death for all Britons within a few years. A timely diagnosis can also ensure a longer life expectancy here.
The figures on the number of additional deaths come at a time when it is clear that the UK’s healthcare system is facing huge problems. More than ten thousand patients cannot be discharged from hospital because there is no reception available through social services.
The ambulance services also face major problems. Officially, they must respond to a call within eight minutes. But in Cornwall, a 90-year-old woman had to wait 40 hours this week, including in a plastic sheeting tent hastily erected in her garden, before being admitted to hospital.
Health Minister Stephen Barclay is aware of the problems. He plans to recruit at least 160,000 Health and Social Services nurses by the end of next year. According to The Daily Mail, this is mainly due to massive recruitment campaigns in India and the Philippines.