Newcastle Hospitals to get 'crack team' support to bring down waiting lists

the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne.
-Credit: (Image: Newcastle Chronicle)


Top medics who have helped hospital procedures in London "run like a Formula 1 pitstop" are being sent to Newcastle to help reduce waiting lists.

The Labour Party announced this week that the Government would be sending so-called "crack teams" of clinicians to 20 hospitals with long waiting lists and that are in areas with the highest levels of economic activity. On this list, the Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust was named fourth.

This comes amid calls for NHS support and funding to be redistributed towards areas where there are the greatest health inequalities. The North East is frequently ranked poorly when it comes to how long people here live in good health - and this has a corresponding impact on quality of life and work.

The Newcastle Hospitals NHS Trust currently has 102,762 people on its elective waiting lists. This has fallen since a peak of almost 110,000 in October 2023, but is an increase on the 99,026 on the list in February. The trust says it has made progress, especially when it comes to treating those who have waited the longest - but that there is more to be done.

Speaking in a hospital trust board meeting on Friday, managing director Rob Harrison said: "We have a lot more to do when it comes to elective recovery but we have been making progress reducing the longest waiters."

Health Secretary Wes Streeting announced the measures in a speech at Labour Party Conference this week. He said: "Ending the junior doctor strikes was central to our commitment to deliver 40,000 more appointments a week to cut waiting lists. But as well as getting staff back to work, we need to get them working at the top of their game.

"We’re sending crack teams of top clinicians to hospitals across the country to roll out reforms - developed by surgeons – to treat more patients, and cut waiting lists. The first hospitals targeted by these teams will be in areas with the highest numbers of people off work sick.

"Because our reforms are focused not only on delivering our health mission but also moving the dial on our growth mission. We will take the best of the NHS to the rest of the NHS, get sick Brits back to health and back to work. That’s the difference a Labour government makes.”

National figures suggest there are currently 2.8m people out of work due to ill-health - and that figure has risen by half a million since 2019. The current national NHS waiting list has 7.6 million elective procedures on it - though some of those will relate to the same person waiting for multiple operations. 3.1m of those people have been waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment.