We have had plenty of anecdotes about people failing to be diagnosed with serious diseases during lockdown. This is thanks to either to hospitals cancelling appointments, GP surgeries stopping face-to-face meetings or people picking up the message that they should protect the NHS by trying not to use it.
It seems clear that the rush to lockdown had significant unintended consequences for healthcare
But what about quantifying the problem? The National Institute for Health Research has attempted to do just this. In a paper published in the Lancet Public Health, it looked at the number of diagnoses which were made in Salford between 1 March and 31 May this year and compared them with the number of diagnoses that would have been expected over that period, calculated from records over the past decade.
They found that 1,073 diagnoses of mental health problems were made in the three months to 31 May, compared with an expected 2,147.
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