NHS teams have provided expert care to more than 600,000 patients in hospital with COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. Alongside this unprecedented pressure, by rapidly adapting services to ensure the safety of patients, those teams have also delivered over 23 million episodes of elective care, 36 million key diagnostic tests, 4.2 million urgent cancer checks, and over 530,000 first treatments for cancer.
Moorfields Eye Hospital has used surgical hubs to reduce the time cataract patients spend in hospital to around 90 minutes. In Nottingham, as well as other parts of the country, teams have held ‘Super Saturdays’, performing the same procedure all day to reduce changeover times for equipment and staff. And in Milton Keynes and many other hospitals, surgeons and their teams are using the latest technology, including surgica robots, to deliver more complex surgery with faster recovery times. Key initiatives proposed in the paper include – The scaling up of community and NHS based sites for surgical procedures and convenient, quick diagnostic checks, towards our ambition of a network of surgical hubs and diagnostic centres covering the entire country.
