‘Thanks to two years on the NHS waiting list, I'm now an inch shorter'
In March 2022, Jason Foster tripped over his dog, fell down the stairs, and broke his back.
The pain was harrowing. Even worse, he says, it was matched by the agony he faced during his 20-month wait for surgery on his T12 wedge fracture, owing to the inefficiency of the NHS. 'For almost two years, I survived on stoicism and morphine,' says Foster.
Following the accident, which occurred while he was renovating his late mother's house near Taunton, copy-editor Foster, 55, was referred back to a hospital in south London, near his Surrey home. 'I had an X-ray, and was told I'd need to have an operation,' he says. 'They then sent me on my way with pain relief, a walking stick, and a spinal brace to stop me going 'full Jenga'. No-one told me how long I would have to wait.'
Over the next few months, the hospital made three appointments for him, which it then cancelled before the allotted times. 'I turned up on another morning, and it was the doctor's day off,' says Foster. 'When I asked one receptionist some hard questions, she called her senior colleague who said I had 'hurt her feelings'.'
In August 2022, to his great relief, Foster was finally called in for surgery, but the consultant on the rota that day didn't agree that an operation was the best course of action, so Foster was sent home again. 'Meanwhile, I had a hole in my back and was getting shorter by the day, because my vertebrae were crushing into one another,' he says.
The question of 'urgency'
Cancelled appointments, lost paperwork, a black hole of communication – anyone who uses the NHS will be used to this catalogue of failures. Perhaps the most concerning thing is that these delays don't just affect routine appointments, but those also deemed ' urgent '.
According to a King's Fund report released in May last year, the NHS declares that 92 per cent of people waiting for elective (non-urgent) treatment, such as cataract surgery or a knee replacement, should wait no longer than 18 weeks from referral to their first treatment.
'This standard was last met in September 2015,' the King's Fund said at the time. 'Since then, performance has declined steadily, until the Covid-19 pandemic, when it deteriorated rapidly.'
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