NHS failing elderly in hour of need, report finds

Shortfalls laid bare in investigation by Lord Darzi, a former health minister, including doubling in pensioners’ A&E waiting times

The NHS fails the elderly in their hour of need, a landmark report has found.
The investigation by Lord Darzi, a surgeon and a former health minister, will lay bare the lack of care given to the most vulnerable, with a doubling in A&E waiting times for pensioners.
The report, which is expected to guide the Government’s strategy on the NHS after it is published on Thursday, will warn that too many elderly people have been left to suffer “appalling experiences” at the hands of the health service.
Lord Darzi told The Telegraph: “I am deeply concerned that older people have been let down.
“After a lifetime of contributing to the NHS, they rightly expected it to be there for them in their hour of need. But the NHS is no longer able to hold up its end of the bargain.”
The independent investigation was ordered by Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, a week after Labour won the election, when he declared the NHS “broken”.
On Thursday, it will warn that those who need the health service the most are being repeatedly let down.
The review found that average A&E waiting times for the elderly have doubled in 15 years.
Pensioners in need of care can now expect to wait almost six hours in casualty units (5 hours 54 minutes), up from less than three hours (2 hours 55 minutes) in 2008.
It will also say that 2.5 million patients on NHS waiting lists in England are over the age of 65.
The report, which runs to about 140 pages, will catalogue a litany of failings in the way the NHS operates, criticising the way swaths of routine healthcare activity was halted during the pandemic.
Other countries did far better, in continuing to run services, the investigation will find, highlighting the billions more that other nations have spent on capital expenditure.
Lord Darzi, who served as a health minister under Gordon Brown, is expected to blame “underinvestment” and the 2012 “top-down reorganisation of the NHS” under the Tories for the extent to which backlogs mounted during the pandemic.
The views from a former Labour health minister are expected to stoke fierce political rows.
Victoria Atkins, the shadow health secretary, has already raised concerns that the report is “cover for the Labour Party to raise our taxes in the budget in October”.
Ministers have said that the surgeon’s findings will provide the basis for a 10-year plan to “radically reform the NHS and build a health service that is fit for the future”. The plan is expected to be published early next year.
Lord Darzi’s investigation is expected to warn that NHS progress is going backwards for the first time in 50 years, with progress cutting deaths from heart disease now in reverse.
He is particularly concerned about the failure of the service to meet the needs of elderly, with most people suffering from multiple long-term conditions by the age of 75.
Highlighting some older people’s “particularly appalling experiences” of A&E, Lord Darzi is expected to warn that some have faced waits of more than 24 hours.
More than half a million older people have been waiting more than six months for treatment, while 90,000 have been waiting for longer than a year.
He will also warn that the NHS’s youngest patients are being failed, with almost 500,000 children a year facing waits of more than four hours in A&E.
Lord Darzi, 64, is a pioneering surgeon who won the nickname “Robo Doc” for spearheading the use of keyhole surgery and robotics in operating theatres.
Under the previous Labour government, he recommended the rollout of polyclinics – major sites bringing together GPs with a wider range of services from 8am until 8pm.
The plans were opposed by the British Medical Association and abandoned by the coalition government.
But Labour has floated similar ideas and will pilot neighbourhood health centres bringing together different services.
Lord Darzi was a health minister from 2007 to 2009, but he resigned the Labour whip in July 2019, while Jeremy Corbyn was leader, when the peer raised concerns over anti-Semitism.
He remains an independent peer. From 2009 to 2013, he was global ambassador for life sciences, retaining the role under the coalition government.
Lord Darzi is an honorary consultant surgeon at Imperial College Hospital NHS trust, and holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London, the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research.
The peer has previously said that hospitals should provide far more care seven days a week, noting: “British Airways does not leave its planes on the tarmac over the weekend.”
Currently, half of NHS hospitals close their operating theatres at weekends, with the number of elective operations, such as hip replacements, falling by 80 per cent on Saturdays and Sunday.
During the pandemic, Lord Darzi volunteered to work on an intensive care unit.
In 2007, the surgeon, who was knighted in 2002 for services to medicine and surgery, performed CPR on Lord Brennan, a Labour peer who collapsed in the House of Lords.
He used a defibrillator to help save Lord Brennan’s life. “As I was shocking him, I saw the Archbishop of York doing his prayers,” he said afterwards.
Lord Darzi was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II, who personally appointed him to the Order of Merit in 2016.
He was part of the late Queen’s funeral procession, and subsequently bore the Armills at the Coronation of the King.