Recent NHS figures show that 139,852 people locally are waiting for treatment, and 9,826 of those people have been waiting for more than a year.
Tony Lloyd said, “Record numbers of people in Rochdale are waiting for care and they are waiting longer than ever before, often in pain and distress. Local health care staff worked heroically throughout the pandemic but they have been stretched like never before.
As leading Conservative Cabinet Minister Nadine Dorries admitted, a decade of Conservative mismanagement left the NHS “wanting and inadequate” when Covid struck, and patients are now left to wait too long as a result.
Our NHS is crying out for a Labour government to rebuild our NHS with the staff, equipment and modern technology needed to treat patients on time again.”
Figures from the NHS show that 139,852 people are waiting for treatment at the Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust. At the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, following a decade of Tory mismanagement there were 4.4 million people on the NHS waiting list in England, then a record high. Nationally, the standard of 92% of people seen within 18 weeks of a referral has not been met since 2016. Now, 1 in every 9 people in England are on the NHS waiting list.
The NHS went into the latest wave of Covid infections with the longest waiting list ever, understaffed and overstretched.
The Conservative Government published its elective care recovery plan for the NHS this week but failed to set out how it would address the workforce shortages. The plan set the Government’s ambition as beginning to reduce waiting lists in 2024.
