A woman left waiting nearly four years to have various NHS surgeries, says the impact of the delays has been “soul destroying”.
Across England, some 6.1 million people are waiting for hospital care, including more than 23,000 who have been waiting for more than two years.
For Jo Goulding, who has lived with rheumatoid arthritis since she was seven, the wait for surgery has left her in “agonising” chronic pain and “relying on painkillers” to simply get by.
The 49-year-old has been on the list for two elbow replacements since 2018, a shoulder replacement since 2019 and only had a hip replacement, which she was waiting for since 2020, in March.
Due to the length of the wait, when she was finally seen she needed more extensive surgery because the artificial hip had caused problems with her pelvis.
“The pain was eating me up from the inside out, nothing took the pain away, and the limitations in my life have been soul-destroying,” the mother-of-two explained.
“I don’t know how I managed over the last two years. The most upsetting thing is that it’s not just my life, but my family’s lives too, which have been affected.”
“My kids are only little, nine and 10, and I found my daughter crying the other day because she’d seen me wincing in pain, knowing there was nothing she could do to help me,” the civil engineer told PA news agency.
She said that living with chronic pain “sucks the life out of you”, adding that she had to re-mortgage and adapt her home to cope.
Mrs Goulding believes the patients who have been waiting for the longest “get lost” in the numbers and the NHS is “beyond breaking point”.
Read more: NHS tracker postcode search – See how your local trust is performing
Dozens waiting more than three years for hospital care
It comes as data obtained by PA show that dozens of people have been waiting at least three years for hospital care in England due to a “shocking” NHS backlog.
At least nine have been waiting at least four years for treatment.
One patient, whose details have been kept anonymous, has been waiting nearly six years for treatment.
Other trusts with seemingly long waiters at the end of January, according to FOI data supplied by individual trusts, included a patient waiting for seven-and-a-half years (390 weeks) at Mid and South Essex NHS Trust for gastroenterology care.
A quarter of the longest waiters at the 69 trusts which supplied data are waiting for care for trauma and orthopaedic care – which covers hip and knee replacements.
Four of the longest waiters were waiting for gynaecology services and six were waiting for urology care.
Follow the Daily podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Spreaker
Read more: NHS cancer treatment waiting times at record high – how bad are they and why?
NHS leaders said they are doing “all they can” to dig into the backlogs but efforts have been hampered by pressures on the emergency care system, COVID cases and high rates of staff absences on top of severe workforce shortages.
The latest official figures from NHS England show that a total of 23,778 people were waiting more than two years to start routine hospital treatment at the end of January – around nine times the 2,608 people who were waiting longer than two years in April 2021.
Professor Neil Mortensen, president of the Royal College of Surgeons of England described the waiting times as “shocking” and warned that it could “cause real emotional and physical distress”.
An NHS spokesperson said: “NHS staff are working flat out to clear the backlogs that have inevitably built up throughout the pandemic with local teams using innovative approaches to reducing waits, such as one-stop shops and Super Saturdays, all while we continue to see busy emergency services and high numbers of hospitalised COVID patients.”