Health secretary visits Derbyshire with no guarantees over hospital corridor treatment this Winter

The health secretary has said he cannot guarantee that patients will not be treated in corridors this winter on a visit to Royal Derby Hospital, amid a local waiting list “struggle”.

Local Democracy Reporter Eddie Bisknell detailed that, during a visit to Derby, Wes Streeting, the health and social care secretary, announcing a reduction in national waiting lists, said he was aware of the struggles in the city hospital trust.

Nationally, waiting lists have fallen by 250,000 patients but the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust reports its referral to treatment waiting list sits stagnant at 108,000, up from 102,000 this time last year.

Its “worst-case” scenario prediction of clearing its list of patients waiting more than a year by June 2025 is now set to be exceeded with in over 100 patients waiting more than 52 weeks.

Mr Streeting said: “I’m not just here to bang the drum about things that are going well, I’m here to hear about the challenges as well and Derby has had its fair share of challenges in terms of getting the waiting list down.

“I must say, I am really impressed with what I have seen. I think the hospital leadership are focussing on all the right things in terms of bringing down the waiting list, they’ve focused particularly on the longest waiters, people waiting over a year. 

“The trust are doing absolutely the right thing to focus on those long waiters.

“The waiting lists haven’t come down as fast in Derby, so I arrived in Derby ready to say ‘what is going on with the waiting lists, we need to go a bit faster on this’.

“Last week they went through over 2,000 patients on their waiting list. They are putting their foot down on the accelerator.

“I hope that residents across Derby know that I have got my eyes on what is going on and to be fair to the hospital leadership and the frontline staff, they are absolutely determined to bust the backlog and get people seen faster.

“It is genuinely impressive what they did last week to shift two per cent of their waiting list in a single week. That is exactly the sort of effort that we can be proud of.”

When the local waiting list statistics were put to him Mr Streeting said: “Those are the questions I had.  Why is it when we are getting the waiting lists down nationally, why have we been struggling here in Derby? 

“They reassured me that as well as dealing with the longest waiters they are also ramping up progress on the waiting list overall. 

“I am hoping and leaving with a greater degree of confidence that we will see waiting lists in Derby moving in the right direction, as we are seeing in other parts of the country, and if that is not happening, it is a gentle reminder to hospital trusts across the country that I have got my beady little eye on waiting lists not just nationally but trust by trust.”

Last winter saw the Royal Derby trust rely on paying for private bedspace, a large trailer outside A&E for overflow space, and putting hospital beds in so-called “non-clinical” areas – a long-standing issue in the NHS locally and nationally. 

Mr Streeting said: “I have been waging war on some of the nonsense jargon like temporary escalation spaces and non-clinical spaces, by calling what it is, corridor care, and we are shortly going to start publishing data on the number of beds in corridors because I think sunlight is the best disinfectant and if we are not honest about the scale of the challenge, we are not going to deal with it.  The trust leadership fully support that approach.”

When it was put to Mr Streeting that the trust had previously rejected the idea it was using corridors for care and that these were risk-assessed appropriate areas, he said: “I have said this morning that we will be publishing the data and they fully support it. They know that we have got to change the way we do things in the NHS.

“It is not going to be easy.

“I’d love to sit here and tell you that this winter there won’t be anyone on trolleys in corridors in Derby but I can’t guarantee that.”

Mr Streeting said: “The thing I really want to reassure Derby residents about more than anything else though is that there is light at the end of the tunnel in the NHS, it is moving in the right direction, but there isn’t a hint of complacency from me. 

“I know that for the quarter of a million patients off the waiting list, great news for the people that have benefited but there are still over seven million waiting.

“I know there are 1,500 more GPs but there will still be people that struggle to get through to their GP today.

“Please don’t think that when I am reporting back with the progress that there will be any hint of complacency, we have done a lot and I hope people can take heart from that. I am not going to be satisfied until the job is done.”

When asked how he would work with a Reform-led Derbyshire County Council on the issue of providing care for patients to be able to be discharged from hospital promptly – clearing so-called “bed-blocking” issues, Mr Streeting said: “Obviously I wouldn’t have chosen to have a Reform county council here but I respect that is the choice that people have made and regardless of our party political differences I am always up for working constructively with other political parties in local government. 

“We need joined-up working, regardless of who is in power.”