Midlands hospital trust sends patients 190 miles to Northumberland

At a University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust board meeting, updates were given on its waiting lists of patients waiting for a year and for two years.

There are 5,433 patients who have waited longer than a year for care and 335 patients have been waiting for care for more than two years.

Sharon Martin, the trust’s executive chief operating officer, detailed that some clinically overweight patients in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire – the bariatric surgery patients – would be asked to seek treatment elsewhere.

She said: “The other big focus going on until the end of next month is getting 104-week waits down in elective care, usually priority four, who are patients who have waited the longest time because clinically they are not necessarily a high priority.

“We are struggling with capacity in orthopaedics and have moved some patients from Derby to Burton.

“We have got complex patients still remaining on the waiting list and we have got around 79 patients that we still need to treat.

“We are a regional centre for bariatric patients, these are patients with a high body mass index. We provide that for Derbyshire and for Nottinghamshire.

“Those patients weren’t able to have their surgery during Covid because it was deemed very high risk and we now are asking some of those patients to have their treatment elsewhere and some are agreeing to have their treatment elsewhere.

“We have got support from another organisation and that’s really positive and we are trying to encourage some of our patients to transfer and have their surgery there, but that is quite a challenge for us and it is asking patients to have care outside their normal area of treatment.”

Board papers detail: “The trust has agreed, with patients consent, for a small number of bariatrics patients to be treated at Northumbria.”

Ms Martin added: “We remain concerned about the waits in the emergency department and the increased delays to be discharged from care. We have got some real problems in terms of capacity.”