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Tens of thousands of patients could die because the NHS suspended such a large proportion of normal care to focus on addressing Covid-19, MPs warned.
Diseases that went undetected or treated included cancer and heart disease, the Commons health and social care committee says in a compelling report.
“We have heard of serious service disruptions, especially cancer, and here we could be seeing tens of thousands of preventable deaths in a year,” said former health secretary Jeremy Hunt, who chairs the interparty select committee.
MPs noted that many hospitals stopped performing cancer surgeries as the pandemic unfolded in March, even though England’s NHS chief Sir Simon Stevens guaranteed that care would continue.
Once the lockdown began on March 23, urgent referrals to GPs for cancer were reduced by 62%, the number of MRIs and CT scans to diagnose the disease was reduced by 75%, and by mid-September May, 36,000 cancer operations had been canceled.
“Cancer services and treatments have been suspended or altered due to capacity constraints, reallocation of resources and in order to manage the risk of patients, especially those who are immunosuppressed and have a higher risk of contracting and later not being able to recover from the disease. coronavirus ”, the committee found.
Macmillan Cancer Support said that the interruption of normal care had created a “cancer time bomb” of untreated patients and that the diagnosis of some had been delayed for six months.
More than 6,400 patients in England with suspected cancer have waited more than 100 days to start treatment or have a diagnostic test since their GP referred them as an urgent case, the Health Service Journal revealed Tuesday. Of these, 472 were known to have cancer and were waiting to start treatment.
Nearly 1 million women across the UK have not been able to have a mammogram since March because breast cancer screening tests were suspended, the charity Breast Cancer Now said this week. It is estimated that around 8,600 of those women will have had a delay in the diagnosis of the disease.
The NHS Confederation hospital group previously warned that shutting down care to combat Covid “would come at a terrible cost” to those affected.
Hospitals are dealing with a huge backlog of tests, exams and treatments, especially surgeries, that have accumulated. Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, who speaks on behalf of the NHS trusts in England, denied that the NHS had ever become a “Covid-only service” and predicted that it would “take many months or even years to recover the delay “.
In an urgent call for action, MPs also told the government and the NHS to start testing all health service personnel every week for the coronavirus, especially with a second wave of Covid-19 and the winter. on my way.
Regular testing of the NHS’s 1.4 million employees is vital to preventing hospital-acquired Covid outbreaks and ensuring the service can maintain normal care for months to come, which it has told hospitals to do.
The ministers have promised to bring weekly evidence, but that has not happened in all but a few trusts.
The committee has asked Professor Chris Whitty, the medical director, to clarify whether the failure to meet that commitment so far is due to England’s testing system lacking the capacity to handle the large amount of additional testing involved.
“Weekly testing of NHS staff in hotspot areas has been promised repeatedly, but this is not yet being delivered. Failure to do so creates a real risk that the NHS will be forced to withdraw to become a majority Covid-only service during a second peak, ”Hunt said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “The decisive and extensive action we have taken, guided by scientific advice, has meant that the NHS was not overwhelmed even at the peak of the virus, so that everyone could always get the best possible care.
“NHS staff with symptoms can access testing as a priority and staff in outbreak areas can access testing if they are asymptomatic. We will continue to expand test availability as our capacity continues to expand to 500,000 tests per day at the end of October.
“Diagnosing and treating diseases such as cancer have remained a priority throughout the pandemic and, to help the NHS prepare for winter, we have provided additional funding of £ 3 billion.”
