Backlog of operations ‘will take years to clear’

The longest waiting periods are for orthopaedic surgery, including hip and knee replacements, with more than 600 people on that list.

Waiting times are expected to increase further over the next three months because of a shortage of theatre nurses and a ‘referral bulge’ of patients who were reluctant to see their GPs during the pandemic.

Health bosses have stressed that urgent and emergency operations are not affected by the delays, so for example if a woman finds a breast lump she can still see a breast surgeon within two weeks.

During lockdown, urgent operations classed as priority one or priority two – including cancers, appendicitis, broken bones and gall bladder surgeries – were maintained as normal.

But the majority of operations such as joint replacements, cataracts and hernias were put on hold.

Dr Gary Yarwood, the chairman of the Medical Specialist Group, was upfront about the challenges faced.

‘We have to maintain a normal level of service just to stay still, and then there’s an excess as well, so I think it will take a long time, and it’s more likely years than months.’

The plan to tackle the waiting lists involves maximising theatre space and currently theatres are being used into the evenings and night time.

A recruitment drive is under way to appoint more theatre nurses, because some of those posts became vacant during the lockdown when staff from the UK quit in order to move back to be closer to their families.

Last year, the orthopaedic waiting list was dealt with partly by spending extra to send patients to the UK.

However, that option is no longer on the table because UK hospitals have an even worse backlog and are still dealing with Covid-19 patients.

Dr Peter Rabey, the medical director at Health & Social Care, said that more funding was not the answer to the problem.

‘No. To be blunt we can’t spend it. If you give more money to go off-island nobody would take our money to do the cases because there’s just no capacity out there.

‘The States of Guernsey have given us everything we’ve asked for during this Covid crisis, they’ve been absolutely brilliant, and if we can get to a point where we can throw money at the problem all well and good, but just now we’ve got to make our theatres work as hard as they can.’

Those theatres are now teeming with activity, but the legacy of the pandemic means that some islanders face a long and possibly painful wait for treatment.

The Princess Elizabeth Hospital was never overwhelmed during the lockdown, and Dr Yarwood remains convinced that cancelling non-urgent operations was the right course of action.

‘It was an absolutely crucial part of the suppression of Covid. If we’d tried to run the hospital normally then we wouldn’t have got on top of it, we’d have had more death.

‘We’re quite a small hospital, we don’t have that many staff, if staff had got infected there wouldn’t have been anyone to look after you. The worst case scenario was a proper Armageddon locally in Guernsey.’