Thank you for getting in touch with your concerns about the delays to treatment faced by those with arthritis. I highly commend Versus Arthritis for their work to support people suffering with arthritis and to raise awareness of the condition.
While Ministers were keen to ensure that the NHS remained open for business throughout the pandemic, the immense pressures of the pandemic have led to an inevitable backlog in elective surgery.
Delays have been caused both by the sheer demand on the system from those suffering from Covid-19, as well as clinical decision-making which concluded that for some, the risk of coming into high-transmission settings like a hospital outweighed the benefits of having surgery.
I believe 4.7 million people in England are now waiting for care, with around 380,000 of those having been waiting more than a year. I agree that we must act urgently to tackle this problem.
To tackle this backlog, the Government is already working with the NHS to accelerate service recovery. In March 2021, an additional £7 billion of funding was announced for healthcare services – including £1 billion to target backlogs in elective services. This is on top of the wider £34 billion funding package for the NHS that is the longest and largest funding package in the NHS’s history.
I know that staff throughout the NHS are working extremely hard to tackle the backlog. In the first two months of this year, NHS staff completed almost 2 million operations and other elective care while also providing treatment to 140,000 COVID-19 patients in England.
However, I agree that there is more work to be done in this area over the coming months and I would be happy to work with local healthcare organisations to encourage people to seek the care that they need, and to ensure that patients experiencing delays in treatment, including people waiting for joint replacements, have all the support that they need in the meantime.
Thank you again for reaching out to me on this issue.