Could the NHS backlog be even worse than we feared? It’s been reported that the pandemic has pushed a total of five million people onto NHS England waiting lists. But speaking to BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, health secretary Sajid Javid revealed a new figure, which was not previously in the public domain:
As a fresh set of eyes coming in, the thing that shocked me most was the huge waiting list and the number of people that did not come forward because of the pandemic. We estimate there’s some seven million people that did not come forward to the NHS to be helped with things like cancer, with heart disease. Think about the deaths that have been sadly caused by that.
It’s hard to wrap one’s head around that figure. Harder still, to understand why the details of these ‘seven million people that did not come forward’ are only now coming to light.
Early indications suggest a willingness to be upfront with the public and make hard but important arguments
It marks another stark contrast between Javid and his predecessor Matt Hancock: it’s not just their attitudes towards risk and reopening that differ, but how they perceive what’s happened to non-Covid patients throughout the pandemic.
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