New data reveals that families increasingly turn to private hospitals for children’s healthcare needs, with the number of children undergoing private treatment rising nearly a quarter in the UK in 2020 to over 46,000, even though private healthcare providers saw reduced demand during the pandemic. Many parents were forced to pay for or use insurance to cover treatment instead of relying on the NHS. The disclosure coincided with warnings that children in England risk not receiving timely medical treatment and joining the “forgotten generation” of NHS patients due to long waiting lists. The Royal College of Surgeons of England found that children have been left behind and may have to wait years for NHS treatment at the cost of their health and development.
As of this month, at least 20,000 children across the UK have experienced waits of over a year to access treatment, up by 15% from last year. Such waits were very rare before the pandemic, and most occur in England, where there are now almost 16,000 extreme waits. NHS trusts urge the government to prioritise children specifically by offering them more funding to commission more surgery and increasing the number of reserved beds to improve paediatric care.
Additionally, data published by the Private Healthcare Information Network show that at least 24,000 children underwent surgery privately in 2020, up almost a fifth from 2019 figures, reflecting an overall 38% increase since that year. In Northern Ireland, children are reportedly experiencing inordinate delays in accessing NHS surgery, with many waiting four or five years, as described by Niall McGonigle, a thoracic surgeon in Belfast, in a call to the Northern Ireland Assembly to address the backlog of cases as he believes that patients are coming to harm.
The situation has been exacerbated by the pandemic, with delays in access to treatment risking leaving children with inoperable conditions, as has been the case for six-year-old Jack Dorrity from Ballymena, who has cerebral palsy and has been waiting for a hip operation for three years. The surgeon warned that both hips needed immediate operations to avoid the muscles pulling them out of their sockets, but one of the hips dislocated while Jack was on the waiting list, and it is growing towards his waist. Without surgery, Jack may be left more disabled by cutting off the top of his leg bone completely. However, the six-hour operation needed can’t be provided by the hospital as it would mean cancelling too many other patients, so parents and children try to find other ways to solve the problem.
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