it can either be the pandemic that exposed health inequalities and made us make hard decisions over who we prioritise for treatment, or we can ignore it and keep doing almost what we were doing before and focus on things like the headline number of how many people are being treated, without really realising if that s leading to widening health inequalities or not. according to their research, shared with panorama, since the pandemic began, people waiting for treatment in the most deprived parts of england are nearly twice as likely to wait more than a yearfor care. those parts of the country that are the most deprived are the areas that are seeing waiting lists grow the most and also people who are waiting on those lists, a higher proportion are waiting for longer periods of time. and in a way that probably isn t a surprise. but it should be, it should be one of those wake up calls that depending on what part of the country you live, it really does affect how long you re waiting for ca
nhs scotland says the women s health plan sets out a number of actions to improve access to appropriate support, speedy diagnosis and the best treatment for endometriosis. and that their nhs recovery plan sets out commitments over the next five years, backed by more than £1 billion worth of funding to address backlogs . the nhs is there both to provide care, but also to protect people from the crippling cost if you have to go it alone. the big worry about these long waits leading people to have to go private is, one, that it will increase inequalities, but that also many people will be forced to make awful trade offs
over their finances in order to be able to get access to the care that they need when they need it. and that goes against every grain of why we set up that health service. 61 year old brenda pugh lives in constant agony. she was diagnosed with arthritis five years ago. early in the pandemic, brenda was told she needed a double hip replacement. that was 11; months ago, and she s still waiting. i can t live with this pain. when you try and move it s like. it s like walking onjagged glass and it takes your breath away. i need to get my life back, but ijust don t know when or if that will ever happen. before the first lockdown, around 400 people had been waiting more than 12 months for orthopaedic surgery in england. now there are 62,000,
that s 1.3 million more than at the start of the pandemic. this month the government announced they ll be investing £36 billion on nhs and social care for all four home nations up to 2025. 10 billion of that has been committed to address the backlog in england. we need to pay for those missed operations and treatments. and we need to go beyond the record funding we already provided for the nhs. i have to level with people waiting lists will get worse before they get better. what does that mean? i think it means two things. number one, we can expect the waiting list to continue to grow as more people come forward to gp services requesting treatment. and the second thing is, once you re on the waiting list, how long do you wait? the problem is the scale
businesses are chipping in. it s absolutely amazing. i hope everything works. thank you so much. thank you. that s amazing. northern ireland s health and social care board says that before the pandemic the number of people waiting longer than the target waiting times was already increasing. it says it s just set out a five year plan to tackle the backlog and additional funding has been confirmed to help reduce waiting lists for a range of time critical surgical treatments, including scoliosis. it s now a month since sofia s surgery and she s recovering well. so it s nice to get my life back. nice to be able i to go for a walk. exactly.