1/11 Latest performance statistics released today by NHS England. A&E for July and other figures for June: england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-…. There is quite a lot to be concerned about, so I'm going to do a thread giving my thoughts.
2/11 NHS trusts clearly under huge pressure in June / July, across the board, with worrying performance drops in A&E, cancer and elective surgery. We traditionally use these months to recover from winter and, for example, catch up on elective surgery., Not happening this year...
3/11 Struck by how many trusts have told us that they still haven't "got back to normal" after the very difficult late winter e.g. escalation beds still open, pressure on elective surgery. Ancedotal sense of continuing pressure reflected in today's performance statistics...
4/11 Worried about impact on staff of not being able to "catch breath again" after difficult winter. Definite sense from trusts of growing burnout danger of asking staff to work at unsustainably high levels all year round, e.g. cope with record A&E demand in July.
5/11 A&E demand figures worrying. I remember Jim Mackey telling me winter before last he was worried when we went past record of 50,000 attendances in a day. This winter's record was 60,000. AVERAGE daily A&E attendances in July were 70,000. Aaagh - look at the rate of increase.
6/11 Trusts & staff working incredibly hard to cope with extra A&E demand - they dealt with a whopping 16% more patients within the 4 hour target than last year (233k vs 200k). But still worst July performance ever - they simply can't keep up with size/speed of increasing demand.
7/11 It's not just A&E performance under pressure - worrying year on year drops in elective surgery performance and cancer. Cancer story echoes A&E - 6% increase in number of patients seen following urgent GP referral over last 12 months but performance still getting worse.....
8/11 It remains frustrating that I can't comment in detail on performance in community and mental health sectors due to absence of rounded set of performance figures for them but, anecdotally, all trust members report being under huge pressure in June / July.
9/11 No-one likes a smart alec...but it's really difficult to see how we can now meet the A&E, elective surgery and cancer targets with this level of performance in June / July. Exactly what we warned: see, for example, pp 13-19 in this document nhsproviders.org/media/4606/tou…
10/11 What does June/July performance tell us about 10 Year Plan? One thing is to be realistic about future demand. EG A&E attendances over the last 12 months are up 2.9%. The 2018/19 plan said assume 1%. 2018/19 plan said assume A&E admissions up 2.3%. Actual admissions up 5%.
11/11 10 year plan. We argued in nhsproviders.org/the-nhs-fundin… that we needed to be honest and realistic about how much of the new funding would be spent on recovering performance. June / July performance shows just how difficult that task will be...and how much it will cost.
