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Of: Andreas Käck, Joachim Kerpner
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More than half of the Swedes who were in the queue for surgery in June and July had to wait more than 90 days.
It was the first time in the last decade that more than 50 percent of the queues did not receive the guaranteed service.
– A country like Sweden cannot have such a bad offer for the population, says the president of the Medical Association, Heidi Stensmyren.
In July, 56 percent of all those in the queue for care had to wait more than 90 days for an operation or action decided in specialized care, according to statistics from the municipalities and regions of Sweden, SKR. In June, the figure was almost as bad, 55 percent.
Summer 2020 is a bottomless pit for assurance of care. The worst target compliance in the early 2010s was in August 2019, when 41 percent failed to meet the care guarantee, Aftonbladet’s review shows.
Photo: Johan Knobe
The president of the Medical Association, Heidi Stensmyren.
The president of the Medical Association, Heidi Stensmyren, says:
– This is a major national problem. There is no gray area here, there are too long waiting times and queues in Sweden. They were unacceptably long even before the corona pandemic, now it has only gotten worse.
How much of the problem is due to the corona pandemic?
– About 100,000 operations were canceled during the spring and summer due to the pandemic. But the biggest problem is the long lines before we even get into this. We work without margins, the pandemic has only aggravated a situation that was already bad. It may not have been that many operations would have been canceled if we had had better capacity earlier.
What to do?
– The state must give the authorities a mandate to examine national waiting lists. In some parts of the country, there are extremely long wait times for certain operations. The state cannot say that “we can expect the population to check whether any region has shorter waiting times,” here the state is required to take responsibility towards the population, Stensmyren says.
Photo: Fredrik Sandberg / TT
Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren.
Social Affairs Minister Lena Hallengren says:
– My comment on the numbers is what is very obvious to all the Swedish people, namely that we are in the middle of a pandemic. Of course, in March, when we had an increasing spread of the infection, one of the measures was to postpone what was possible to postpone for medical reasons. You always make priorities, whoever has the greatest need goes first. This still applies.
Two weeks ago, the government appointed a delegation with the task of improving accessibility in health care. The delegation will present a proposal on how the 21 regions will shorten service queues.
– Too many have had to wait too long. The challenge is, of course, even greater after the pandemic spring in which we had to cancel visits for care, operations and treatments, Lena Hallengren told the TT news agency.
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