Who says it isn't happening? Myself, my mum and my husband all work at different hospitals, and I have a friend in another who's places of work have all continued to do urgent/life or limb surgery throughout the pandemic.
As of last week all our places of work have reinstated routine, non urgent work for opd and surgery. As a previous poster has said, processes are taking longer now due to the need for PPE and the beds available and level of cleaning required between turn over so where a ortho list could have done 6 ops in a day, will only be able to do 4. Therefore waiting times will be longer. Same for out patient appts. We've been doing telephone or video appointments for weeks and 1 f2f clinic for ones who need to be examined. This will increase back to normal number of clinics within weeks.
The reason everything "stopped for covid" is pretty obvious isn't it? A&e was inundated everywhere, medics pulled off clinics and ward rounds to support. Extra wards opened to accommodate the influx of acutely unwell patients, these need medics to do ward rounds and care for them, therefore they were pulled again from clinic and surgery, none of the (incredibly) expensive locums wanted to work and put themselves in danger, or doubled their cost per hour (I had a doctor willing to work 40 hour week but at £250 an hour, when normally would be £70-100). A lot of places had a 30-50% sickness rate for medics and nurses. If a medic on the ward is sick in normal times the first thing we do is cancel someone else's clinic to cover the ward, so even if clinics weren't originally cancelled they would have been to cover sickness.
All of that is sheer logistics before we even discuss reducing the likelihood of patients/staff contacting the disease. Look at all the rules for seeing family/going the super market. Why would that be prevented but we could put the doctors and patients at risk still?
All of this was a directive from NHS England. Had this not been done we'd have ended up like Italy or China with patients dying in corridors not even getting into A&E or into wards.
All my patients on every waiting list had been reviewed by the consultant, their latest letter and results etc to make sure nothing that was urgent was lost. This was also a massive exercise.
I really really feel for those that had appointments cancelled over the last few weeks. When you're scared or in pain it's awful to have to wait but seriously, what was the alternative? Plus if you were cancelled I'd be grateful - that means you're not urgent/life or limb threatened.
This wasn't a decision taken lightly by anyone and everyone is working so hard to keep track of every patient and come up with safe innovative ways to get patients back in ASAP. Our targets for treating people within x time frame haven't been relaxed and we'll still be expected to hit them or phase financial penalty. Also we get paid per patient seen in clinic/surgery done/diagnostic or test run, with the majority of this stopping the NHS trust is going to be severely impacted financially for a long time.
It was and is about being safe. Again I'm sorry you've been made to wait and it's awful and regrettable and I do have every sympathy, but perhaps consider the other implications too xxx