RCPCH has long been concerned about the steady rise in waiting times for children and young people in England. Today’s data shows that over 20,000 children are waiting over a year for essential treatments, a 9.7% increase on last month’s data. This rise is unacceptable and clearly indicates that children are being left behind in wider NHS recovery plans.
In response to this month’s data, RCPCH President, Dr Camilla Kingdon, said:
As a paediatrician I have seen firsthand the damaging impact that long waiting times have on children and their families. Many treatments and interventions must be administered within specific age or developmental stages – no one wants to wait for treatment, but children’s care is frequently ‘time critical’. As a college, we have consistently warned that prolonged waits not only impair children's mental and physical development but also have a detrimental impact on their education and overall wellbeing. Long waits for treatment are unacceptable and 20,000 children waiting over a year is unfathomable.
Each month we seeing steady progress being made in shrinking the adult backlog which we commend, but the children’s list continues to rise at an unprecedented rate. These figures, already eye wateringly high, only paint a part of the wider picture as they do not include community paediatrics. It is estimated that there are over 220,000 children waiting for essential community services such as mental health, speech and language and neurodiversity assessments. Today’s data merely confirms what we already know - that there is a fundamental lack of understanding nationally that investment in children has to be a priority. This is primarily for the sake of these patients, but more broadly that healthy children become healthy adults and when we lose focus on childhood there is a cost to society. Policy makers, workforce planners and politicians need to wake up and understand that.
Like many organisations, we have waited longingly for an NHS workforce plan. When published last month we were pleased to see a focus on training and retention, but we were dismayed at the lack of clear focus on the child health workforce, especially in the context of these long waits. More specifically, we were stunned to see the plan notes a 92% increase in adult nursing training places, and inexplicably 0% for child nursing training places. We know that a lack of children’s nurses is a common cause for delayed and cancelled procedures and treatments.
As all child health professionals know, when children’s needs are not specifically addressed in policy and planning, they are forgotten altogether. We cannot allow this to continue. We need to put children back on the agenda.