Britain’s health secretary has admitted that some patients will not be able to get routine appointments with their GPs and some supposedly non-urgent surgeries could be postponed to 2022 as the National Health Service pivots to prioritise administering Covid boosters over other forms of healthcare.
On Sunday night, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Britons to get a third vaccination against the Chinese coronavirus in the face of the “tidal wave” of yet another variant, Omicron, allegedly to “protect” Britons’ “freedoms and our way of life” — and of course to “protect our NHS”.
While citizens are expected to line up for their booster in order to protect the NHS, the prime minister also admitted that the NHS may not be available to everyone for non-vaccine-related matters, saying that “as we focus on boosters and make this new target achievable, it will mean some other appointments will need to be postponed until the New Year.”
“But if we don’t do this now, the wave of Omicron could be so big that cancellations and disruptions, like the loss of cancer appointments, would be even greater next year,” he claimed.
Asked to confirm whether people’s non-vaccine related NHS appointments will be cancelled or postponed, Health Secretary Sajid Javid told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Monday that it was possible that until the end of the year, general practitioners (GPs) “will only be focusing on urgent needs and vaccination” and some supposedly non-urgent surgeries “may have to be postponed” in order for doctors to prioritise administering a third jab to all adults.
“We are throwing everything we possibly can at it… This is not an easy decision to make. It does mean that when it comes to primary care, for the next couple of weeks, that our GPs will only be focusing on urgent needs and vaccination, and it also means non-urgent appointments and elective surgeries may have to be postponed into the New Year,” Mr Javid said.
“For the next two to three weeks, this is the new national mission,” he added.
It is the prime minister’s plan for medics, including GPs and pharmacists, to administer one million boosters a day, bringing forward by four weeks the planned booster drive. This will include mobile vaccination units with some centres being open “at least 12 hours a day”, according to the health secretary, every day apart from Christmas.
The prime minister also said last night that he would also be “deploying 42 military planning teams across every region” to assist the drive.
At the beginning of this month, the National Audit Office (NAO), the government’s independent spending watchdog, warned that there are already between 24,000 and 740,000 “missing” urgent GP referrals for suspect cancer, because millions of people have not been able to access or have avoided accessing basic healthcare services during the pandemic.
The report came after several similar analyses by other organisations predicting suspected mass undiagnosed cancer cases in the tens of thousands, and thousands of potentially avoidable cancer deaths because the socialised medical services have focused on the pandemic.
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