THE impact of Covid-19 on acute hospital services for Maldon district residents has been revealed against a backdrop of hundreds of deaths across the wider Essex area.

The pandemic has challenged all parts of the health and social care system, from social care, primary and community care, mental health services, community and voluntary sector partners and notably, hospitals where waiting times for treatment across the board have rocketed.

The impact of Covid-19 has left waiting times for treatment in mid and south Essex as among the worst in the country, according to new data.

Just 42.1 per cent of patients – equivalent to 38,250 people – were seen within 18 weeks in June, leaving the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust in the bottom seven per cent of trusts.

It means that around 52,000 have been waiting for 18 weeks or more for treatment.

It comes after months of focus on tackling the disease and as of September 2, the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust had treated around 2,000 patients with Covid-19.

More than 1,200 patients were successfully discharged from hospital, although many report ongoing health issues. A total of 864 patients have died in hospital as a result of Covid-19 across the trust's hospitals.

Elective care has been most affected by the pandemic

Elective care is the area most significantly impacted as a result of Covid-19 and comes as a result of the cessation of non-urgent services.

At the end of August the total waiting list across mid and south Essex stood at 90,000, with over 3,000 patients waiting over a year to complete their treatment as the trust implemented reset and recovery plans and modelled how quickly it could reduce the number of very long waits for treatment.

While it is a significant increase in the pre-Covid reported waiting list size, it should be noted that the pre-Covid figures did not include data from Mid-Essex Hospital Services NHS Trust at Broomfield Hospital.

It had been given permission to pause its national reporting of elective care waiting times as it worked to resolve significant data quality issues linked to the migration of its patient administration system.

These issues have now been resolved and the Broomfield waiting list is now included in the overall figure.

The cessation of non-urgent services have also heavily impacted on diagnostic services, such as radiology.

The percentage of people waiting less than six weeks for a radiology scan reduced from being consistently above 95 per cent to around 40 per cent at the end of June 2020.

The trust is trying to work through the backlog caused by the health crisis

The trust has significantly increased activity and is working through this backlog in a clinical priority order. As of the end of August this position had improved to 50 per cent, with the principle long waiters being for ultrasound and CT scans.

The trust continued to achieve the two-week wait standard from GP referral to initial assessment during the pandemic with around 93 per cent of all referrals being seen within this time period. The number of patients waiting more than 62 days from their original GP referral through to the start of their treatment increased from around 180 pre-Covid to a peak of around 650.

This is being progressively reduced as activity has been restored and at the end of August was around 350.

A statement to the health and wellbeing board at Essex County Council (ECC) said: "As a partnership, we are working together to address these significant challenges with the absolute aim of treating patients with urgent conditions (eg cancer) and those who have waited longest for planned care, as soon as practicably possible.

"We have established a number of operational re-set programmes to oversee the safe resumption of services, and have dedicated resources to support recovery of the cancer and elective care waiting times standard.

"This includes using independent sector capacity where safe and possible, and asking our clinicians to work extended days and weekends to clear waiting lists. In addition, our clinicians are working together across primary and secondary care to review waiting lists and support those patients waiting for treatment at the hospital with alternative treatment options and non-hospital based support.

"We are working to define our system recovery plan, while also planning for winter and a potential second wave of Covid-19 cases however it is clear that it will be some time until services are recovered to the waiting times seen previous to Covid."