NHS WILL SEND ‘FEWER LETTERS UNDER LABOUR’
The NHS would send fewer letters under Labour amid concerns that Royal Mail delays are making patients miss appointments.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, said he would overhaul the health service’s “analogue” method of communicating with patients and save the more than £200 million a year the NHS spends on posting letters.
Mr Streeting told The Telegraph the Royal Mail’s proposals to cut letter deliveries to just three days a week “must now be a wake up call” for the NHS to move into a “digital age”.
The postal operator proposed it cut second-class letter deliveries to every other day as part of cost-cutting reforms submitted to the regulator, but faced a huge backlash from NHS chiefs and think tanks over fears that further delays to letter deliveries would risk patient safety.
Mr Streeting said: “NHS leaders should be asking why on earth the NHS is still spending £200 million a year on paper and postage? Jeremy Hunt promised to turn the NHS paperless a decade ago.”
The MP for Ilford North said that “many patients have experienced the frustration of missing appointments because the letter arrives too late in the post”.
“Royal Mail’s announcement must now be a wake-up call,” he said. “For a more convenient experience for patients, less waste for the NHS, and better value for taxpayers, Labour will bring our analogue health service into the digital age.”
He said Labour would reform the NHS app and allow all patients to manage appointments directly from it, as well as using it to send reminders and allow patients to rearrange them if necessary at their own convenience.
The app currently allows this in some instances but patient experience varies drastically depending on the hospital and service the patient is using.
“We already manage most of our lives through mobile phone apps, it’s time the NHS caught up, while allowing those patients who prefer to still receive letters,” Mr Streeting added.
Around 2.5 million of the eight million appointments that are not attended by patients each year occur because people are receiving letters after the appointment is meant to have taken place, according to think tank Healthwatch England.
Analysis by NHS England, seen by The Telegraph, also reveals that missed appointments because patients didn’t know about them was the second most common reason for not attending after forgetting, while around one in five were due to admin errors and one in 10 patients couldn’t make contact when trying to cancel or rearrange.
These missed appointments costs the NHS around £1 billion a year in wasted time, with those attributed to late letters costing £300 million.
Data obtained by the Labour Party through freedom of information requests revealed that the health service is itself spending around £210 million a year on paper and postage to send the letters.
It costs the NHS around £1 for every letter it sends to patients, which still happens for the overwhelming majority of hospital appointments, tests, scans, and procedures despite a pledge to go paperless by 2020, and makes the health service one of the Royal Mail’s biggest customers.
The postal operator delivers around seven billion letters a year but this figure continues to decline, leading to it submitting proposals to Ofcom to reduce its commitments amid mounting losses, which were £319 million in the first half of the financial year.
NHS leaders and patient groups have written to the Royal Mail with their concerns about the impact on patient safety but it is understood they are yet to hear back. The Health Secretary also intervened earlier this month with a letter to the postal operator’s chief executive demanding answers.
There were 125 million outpatient appointments in 2023 alone and NHS providers, including hospitals and GP services regularly communicate with patients and staff through mail.
Letters are often a key part of communicating with patients any appointments, changes or cancellations, test results, referrals, and treatment plans, and these can often be time sensitive such as if scans are involved.
Mr Hunt, the Chancellor, pledged to make the NHS paperless by 2018 when he was the health secretary.
This was pushed back two years by the NHS as part of a five-year plan, but the health service has not renewed its target to go fully digital since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
‘At the mercy of the Royal Mail’
National Voices, a health charity advocating for patients, said letters “must remain a priority” but without the NHS being “at the mercy of the Royal Mail”.
Jacob Lant, its chief executive, said: “Any delays in delivering letters can create anxiety for patients and if appointments are missed it can cause a dangerous disruption to people’s care. For the NHS, missed appointments waste both money and time.”
He said: “NHS mail is a basic essential and must remain a priority. A modern health service fit for the future would not be at the mercy of Royal Mail to communicate with patients.”
The Royal Mail has said it is “committed to working with a range of NHS bodies to explore options that could provide more reliability for time-sensitive medical letters”.
It said these could include marked envelopes, barcodes and a hybrid product where doctors would decide if it “warrants a speedy delivery”.
A Department of Health spokesman said: “We are rapidly digitising NHS services, with more than 90 per cent of NHS trusts rolling out electronic patient records and three-in-four adults signed up to the NHS App, which can be used to order repeat prescriptions and manage appointments.
“We are investing £3.4 billion in upgrading NHS technology and harnessing AI to make the NHS faster, simpler and fairer. But we also know that some patients continue to rely on postal services and it is important that they continue to be supported.”
2024-05-10T14:21:33Z dg43tfdfdgfd