At the end of March 2024, MPs from across Mid and South Essex met with the Chief Executive of our local hospitals including Broomfield, Basildon and Southend Hospitals. The Health Minister also attended the meeting in Westminster.
Performance has improved.
Waiting lists are falling, time to diagnosis for cancer patients are getting shorter, A&E wait times are getting shorter and ambulance performance has improved.
Last year our local hospitals treated 4% more patients than in the year prior to the pandemic. In the coming year, from 1 April, they plan to treat 8% more than pre-pandemic.
Waiting times
• There are now around 100 patients who have waited 78 months or more for elective treatment. This is down from a peak of around 3,000.
• The number of patients needing treatment in order to not breach a wait of 65 weeks or more is forecast to be 1,300 by the end of March, at peak this was around 90,000 patients.
• They expect to have no patients waiting 65 weeks or more by the end of June.
Cancer Performance
• The Trust wants to achieve the national target that 75% of people are given a cancer diagnosis within 28 days. In January performance was 57.9% which was well below national average. The performance for March is expected to be around 71% which is likely to be well ahead of the national average.
• The Trust plans to have no more that 475 patients waiting over 62 days to start Cancer Treatment by the end of March.
Ambulance handovers
• In February 83.2% of patients arriving at A&E by ambulances were handed over within 30 minutes, and 41.9% within 15 minutes. In February the average handover time was 24 minutes, well ahead of regional average. This is a very significant improvement on last year, and has been achieved even though ambulance demand has increased by 18%.
A&E wait times
• The trust would like to achieve 77% of patients waiting less than 4 hours at A&E . They are currently at 71% and anticipate being at 76% by June. This is a very significant improvement on last year.
Many different projects have contributed to making these improvements. These include the more efficient use of elective surgery theatres in Braintree which have treated around 2,000 patients this year and are planned to grow to 3,500 patients next year, new community diagnostics services , improvements to discharge and many other measures.
The hospitals are now working on many new projects including working to be the first Hospital Trust in the Country to roll out Electronic Patient Records that combine Hospital Trust, Community Providers and Mental Health Trust services.
There is still more to do. Some days are obviously much busier than others, for example Mondays can be very busy in A&E. Thank you to all our local NHS hospital staff for working so hard to deliver improvements to services.
Anna Firth MP John Whittingdale Stephen Metcalfe Andrew Stephenson MP
