Royal Cornwall Hospital waiting lists doubled over last 13 years

The size of the waiting lists at Cornwall's main hospital has doubled over the last 13 years. There were a total of 43,266 people on the waiting lists of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust in April of this year.

That’s up from 21,713 in April 2011. Much of this though has come since the pandemic. The size of the waiting list rose to 26,762 in February 2020 and was at just 27,397 by April 2021.

It grew rapidly after that and was at 39,871 by April 2022 and peaked at 48,732 in May 2023. The situation in our region is different to that of the country as a whole, which saw larger increases in the austerity years of the Tory government.

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There were a total of 7.57 million people on NHS waiting lists in England in April, up from 7.54 million in March. Since 2011, however, the number has more than trebled.

There were 2.51 million people on waiting lists in April 2011, the earliest time for which we have trust-level figures and a year into the Conservative-led coalition government. They steadily rose to 4.57 million just before the pandemic in 2020, almost twice as high as they had been nine years earlier. Following the pandemic they rose far more sharply to their current levels.

Waiting lists aren’t the only thing to have been on an upward trajectory within the NHS. The proportion of people attending type one A&Es who have had to wait over four hours from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge has also risen.

Just 7.7 per cent of attendances at major A&Es in June 2015 saw the patient have to wait over four hours. By February 2020 that had risen to 27.0 per cent.

Like waiting lists, this shot up even further following the pandemic and currently stands at 40.3 per cent of patients. At Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, the proportion of attendances waiting over four hours at type one A&Es has risen from 18.8 per cent in June 2015 to 60.1 per cent in April 2024. The number of people waiting over 12 hours to be admitted has increased from none to 476 in that time.

A spokesperson for the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust said: “We recognise people are waiting longer than we would like, and our staff are working tirelessly to reduce waits for emergency and planned care.”

An NHS spokesperson said: “As the latest figures show, demand for NHS services across the country remains high – May was a record month for urgent and emergency services, with the highest number of A&E attendances and the busiest May for the most urgent ambulance call-outs, while staff delivered a record number of elective appointments for April.

"The NHS continues to focus on bringing down long waits for routine care and reducing the time that patients spend in A&E. Thanks to the dedication of staff, and a range of measures in the UEC recovery plan to improve care for patients – including greater use of same day emergency care, and meeting our target to deliver an extra 5,000 core beds in hospitals – 20 per cent more patients were seen in A&Es within four hours in May compared with the same month last year."

In April, CornwallLive reported that Royal Cornwall Hospital completed more planned operations and treatments last year than before the pandemic - but people were waiting for longer on average. A spokesperson for the trust said at the time: "In many specialities, we are exceeding national targets, but we know we still have others, such as orthopaedics, where demand is high, and we need to do much more. Through the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Integrated Care Board we are also offering patients a choice of alternative providers.

“We have been working with GP surgeries to provide treatments in more locations and later this year we will be opening a new surgical hub in St Austell in collaboration with Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, providing a further increase in capacity to do more surgery and further reduce waiting times.”

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