Omicron spread ‘could see 100,000 operations cancelled in England this winter’

Chris Whitty insists it is wrong to suggest Covid being prioritised over other conditions

A new study suggests more than 100,000 elective operations could be cancelled in England over the coming months, as a result of the current Omicron wave and the anticipated hospital admissions it could cause.

The report – published in The Lancet journal – saw researchers at the University of Birmingham (UoB) use NHS England data from September 2020 to July 2021 to develop a model that projects elective surgery activity based on the number of Covid patients in hospital at one time.

They chose to conduct their findings in this way after discovering that the number of elective operations performed each week is closely related to the number of patients in hospital with coronavirus.

Using the model, the team estimated that in the first two weeks of October 2021, the number of elective operations in England was reduced to 51,024 – a drop of 14,348 procedures per week compared with the same period in 2019, pre-pandemic.

However, if the number of Covid patients in hospital in England increases to levels seen in the first wave of infections back in April last year, the number of elective operations in England would be cut to 43,225 – a drop of 22,147 per week compared with the same period pre-Covid.

The difference between these two periods, which works out to an estimated 7,799 operations per week, is how the report reached the 100,273 figure when predicting how many elective operations could be cut from the NHS throughout the three winter months: December 2021, January 2022 and February 2022.

Aneel Bhangu, a consultant surgeon and senior lecturer at the NIHR Global Health Research Unit on Global Surgery at the UoB, said the data shows that “as more Covid-19 patients are admitted to hospital, surgical units are forced to cancel elective operations to release capacity to treat [the virus]”.

“Hospitals work hard to prioritise life-saving operations, including those helping cancer patients. The greatest impact of hospital pressures from Covid-19 is on patients waiting for non-life saving, but quality of life-transforming surgery,” he said.

Mr Bhangu stressed that cancellations may mean patients wait even longer for operations such as hip replacements, “resulting in deterioration of their symptoms and increased disability”.

Dr Dmitri Nepogodiev, a research fellow at the NIHR unit, said that surgical patient numbers “have been reduced by the measures hospitals have taken to ensure patient safety and reduce the risk of Sars-CoV-2 infection in hospital ... [and] are further diminished by each incremental increase in Covid-19 admissions to hospital”.

He also said there are other factors, not considered in the study, that could lead to a reduction in the number of elective operations being carried out in England.

The fact Omicron is currently leading to a higher rate of infections, but less hospitalisations, than Delta means more of the public – including NHS staff – will be out sick or forced to isolate and so unable to perform surgical procedures, he explained to The Independent.

He also pointed to the lag between initial infection and hospitalisation, saying “for all we know” hospital admissions for Omicron could become the worst yet. This is the missing data England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, has repeatedly said is needed to ascertain the variant’s true impact.

Speaking before the Commons health and social care committee on Thursday, Prof Whitty signalled it was wrong to suggest Covid-19 was being prioritised over other conditions, though.

People making this claim “have no understanding of health at all,” he told MPs, adding it was an “inversion of reality” to suggest procedures such as those for cancer are being sacrificed for the virus.

Asked by Tory MP Dean Russell what he would say to comments that the chaos surrounding Omicron is taking precedence, Prof Whitty said managing Covid and minimising the impact on other types of care is “central to what we’re trying to do”.

“If we don’t crack Covid at the point when we’ve got big waves as we do now, we do huge damage elsewhere,” he said. “The ideas the lockdowns cause the problems for things like cancer is a complete inversion of reality.”

Prof Whitty added that no one “who is serious” claims coronavirus is being prioritised and, if they do, they are usually trying to “make a political point”.