Mysterious drop in GIDS Waiting List…

[NitroNine]

From TwiX (name of newspaper not given):

Waiting list Sizeable drop
During the last 18 months, staff have been baffled by what appears to be a drop in the numbers on the waiting list.
After the announcement was made in 2022 that Gids would close, there were about 7,000 people on the waiting list, but the current figure being cited is 5,000 - a reduction of 2,000 patients in a period in which, clinicians said, no patients were removed from the list to be seen by staff, but more would have been added.
At the point the list was given to NHS
Arden and GEM in November 2022, there were around 300 new referrals per month, staff said, so if that continued there would now be about 10,000 on the waiting list.
Yet it stands at half of that. Some of these will be 17-year-olds who were moved to the adult waiting list, but this, staff said, would not explain all of that potentially 5,000 drop.
NHS England said only those over 17, any duplicate names or those who asked to be were taken off the list.

Truly a mystery 🤔

What's your evidence for thinking that?

As a GP, I'd say exactly the opposite is true. The adverse publicity around the Tavi, Gender GP, Keira Bell etc etc has made GPs more wary of prescribing (and rightly so).

It's an area that has always needed far better research and data collection. I wonder how many have gone to private care vs desisted

Firmly agree with PP that as the age groups have matured this is now seen as something a bit tragic rather than fashionable. What becomes fashionable becomes unfashionable and rejected. I've been fearing the backlash since 2018: Stonewall let down their constituents when they went for the rainbow glitter rather than the pedestrian grey acceptance originally aimed for by their founders.

@Toseland brilliant! My 17 year daughter is the same ! She is very much a Terf and has a couple of common garden lesbian pals( not trans men- just happy wee lesbians, it's fantastic to see! In all their DM glory!🤣) . Please let this horrible ideology be on the decline.

Yes, just a little anecdote but it cheered me up so much to hear that 😀

Or to put it another way, vulnerable young people have been defrauded and experimented upon by unscrupulous healthcare snake oil salesmen who deliberately withheld the true, dreadful cost of these 'treatments' in order to induce demand.

Or by practitioners simply carried away by their own cleverness and 'progress' -- the thinking seems to have been that if it could be done, it should be done. IIRC, there was a reaction of 'Oh wow, we've got to start doing that!' among UK gender clinics after the initial results of the Dutch puberty blockers.

Could it be that all the talk of a trend and social contagion could be true? And that the trend is starting to come to an end with the other kids eye rolling.

Who'd thunk?

And that parents are asking more questions about the safety of it too.

That children and teenagers grow out of these things.

It's not unusual for several reasons, similar to MH. In some regions, you can be placed on waiting lists by several referrers, each of which is counted as an individual referral.

It was a fad, a form of rebellion, a social contagion like others we've seen in earlier generations, and it was bound to run its course eventually. Also, in recent years, parents have had decent support and the kind of resources they needed to push back, so that's helped. I have teens - they roll their eyes at the trans/non-binary nonsense.

This time last year, my DS was on a two year waiting list for an ASD diagnosis.

The diagnosis and paperwork went to CAMHS then to re branded CAMHS under a different name then to a private provider (who was using a building which still had CAMHs signage). During one of my regular chasing calls, I asked how the waiting list was managed "on a spreadsheet" was the breezy reply.

The point is NHS systems are the opposite of sleek. They are often crap.I think it is a good guess that the Tavi just didn't know, but it was in their interests to make it seem as high as possible.

There are probably other factors too..

GIDS famously never bothered with data so it could be anything from bad publicity to their support dog eating their homework.

We will never know and more importantly, neither will they.

The newspapers seems to be suggesting the waiting list was never as long as the Tavi was suggesting in the first place. Is it normal to have duplicate names on a NHS waiting list??

It's years since i worked with waiting lists, but i can see how duplicates could have occured, even if they really shouldnt happen.

The referrals werent just coming from GPs, mermaids were referring at one point. So its possible that children could have been referred by different sources under different names. Also without an NHS number and and acurate date of birth, it might have been difficult to spot duplicates. Same if they had two addresses or change of address.

The clinic was used to a certain number of referrals for a long time, and may have become overwhelmed by the sudden increase in referrals and never caught up with keeping on top of it all. They may not have ever thought to make sure children still want to be seen, or have moved over to adult waiting list?

There were minutes from meetings online that showed the T&P trust chief exec bragging re: how much publicity GIDS was getting, how referrals were going up and how NHS England were giving them so much money they couldn’t spend it (IIRC lots of it went on building renovations and the budget ring fenced for clinician pay was never spent because they couldn’t recruit).

So I have no doubt that they wouldn’t prioritise pruning out any duplicates on the waiting list.

There was certainly an incentive to show high demand for the service, then suddenly theres incentive to show there isn't.

I am profoundly irritated by GIDS' data and record-keeping.

However, as a separate issue, if this claim is accurate, something is going badly awry. My difficulty is that Strudwick doesn't strike me as somebody who would have done sufficient due diligence to assess this claim

Arden and GEM in November 2022, there were around 300 new referrals per month, staff said, so if that continued there would now be about 10,000 on the waiting list.

Presumably, Simon Wesseley will have the board issue a clarification on this although his remit is the Research Oversight Board. Or Wesseley's counterpart on commissioning, James Palmer (?).

https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/spec-services/npc-crg/gender-dysphoria-clinical-programme/

https://www.england.nhs.uk/commissioning/spec-services/npc-crg/gender-dysphoria-clinical-programme/implementing-advice-from-the-cass-review/cyp-gender-dysphoria-research-oversight-board/

Arden and GEM are an unusual trust who don't deliver clinical services but specialise in data analysis, business planning, HR and so on - basically all the support services you need.

So I would suspect their data gathering is accurate, who knows about what it was before.

To me this just displays why all the moral panic around 'trans trending' has been utterly unnecessary. There were never going to be legions of kids 'being trans to be trendy' who were actually going to go as far as medical intervention because if you're doing it to be trendy that's going to be a bridge too far. I know or have known about a dozen trans kids - 3 have desisted after a few years, none of the other 9 have any interest in medical intervention but have been socially transitioned for at least 2 years. I expect some are trans, and some (probably most) will desist at some point without any harm being done. And I think this is the picture for the vast majority of trans identifying kids.

We're in a stage of working out how things work with all of this, and yes, I think there's a degree of fashion, but trans children do exist and hope we can move to a stage where people get the treatment they need, whether thats trans affirmation or some other kind of mental health support.

Trans rights activists have never wanted to 'trans' cis kids, this isn't a sign of 'defeat' for trans rights - they just want the trans kids to be helped and if services are being better targeted and kids aren't tying themselves in knots about gender identity when that's not the issue, then that's a great outcome in my books.

There is no such thing as ‘transgender child’.

This is a good result then. I am glad for your family.

There were never going to be legions of kids 'being trans to be trendy' who were actually going to go as far as medical intervention because if you're doing it to be trendy that's going to be a bridge too far.

Sadly many girls who were swept up by this craze have had medical intervention. In this country this has mainly been restricted to puberty blockers (apart from those who were unfortunate enough to have been 'treated' by the likes of the Webberleys), but in the US many teenage girls have also had mastectomies.

trans children do exist

They do not. Nobody is born in the wrong body.

Trans rights activists have never wanted to 'trans' cis kids, this isn't a sign of 'defeat' for trans rights - they just want the trans kids to be helped

TRAs, particularly middle-aged male transitioners, have encouraged the idea of the 'trans child' as a sort of human shield. Trans children are an important part of sanitising 'transness' so that it is not seen as something sexual. They help to protect the middle-aged male transitioners from criticism by being viewed as the younger versions of those males.

TRAs don't care about the harm done to these human shields.

Was just about to say that myself!

The whole service is a mess.

They didnt see the increase in demand coming, they had no way of going through the referrals to determine who needs treatment, and the treatment they gave is proven to be lacking.

Its not trans health care, its cruel.

TRA never showed any concern about these facts, they just pushed for more medicalisation for an undiagnosable condition. Its breathtaking for someone to have the brass balls to say its a good thing the clinic never had a clue how many children were held in limbo thinking they were trans.

The GenderGP sub Reddit is interesting. It seems a dodgy pair running a dodgy outfit are in fact doing incredibly dodgy things.

No-one deserves to be ripped off but entrusting your health and wellbeing to them two was never going to end well. They have been well and truly exploited.

MissLucy, when you wrote, 'As a GP, I'd say exactly the opposite is true. The adverse publicity around the Tavi, Gender GP, Keira Bell etc etc has made GPs more wary of prescribing (and rightly so)', what prescriptions are you referring to?

I supervise lots of CAMHS psychologists - these were the professionals I was referring to. 10 years ago, they tended to refer to GIDS when they (rarely) came across YP with symptoms of gender dysphoria, feeling that highly specialist care was needed. As cases increased, they initially did the same. More recently, when encountering YP who initially present as experiencing gender dysphoria, the treating practitioners have felt more confident in exploring and treating the patient's distress without referring on. Parents and the YP typically welcome this as they are desperate for help.

Monty was complaining on Twitter yesterday that his GP had refused to give a repeat prescription for his cross sex hormones. Obviously there might be some back story as to why the GP refused (for example, it might be required that all patients see a specialist at intervals) but Monty’s claim was that the GP was gender critical.

Maybe an increasing number of doctors are actually becoming aware that a scandal is brewing and don’t want to find themselves implicated.