- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 11 January 2000 12.32 GMT
Hospital waiting lists started to climb steeply yesterday as the continuing flu crisis forced cancellation of non-urgent surgery in operating theatres across the country.
Ministers were confident of making good the damage in coming months, but every day that the flu outbreak rages on will throw further doubt on the government's drive to cut the waiting lists.
As he told MPs that the official number of people with flu-like symptoms had risen almost fivefold since early last month, Alan Milburn, the health secretary, said many hospitals which had planned to resume routine surgery yesterday had decided to delay until pressures subsided.
"Hospital managers and clinicians will make judgments about how best to balance their workload in light of local experience over the next few weeks," the minister said in a Commons statement.
"This approach represents a sensible deployment of NHS staff and resources."
The government remains committed to a general election promise to cut hospital waiting lists in England by 100,000 by the end of this parliament, although Mr Milburn has sought to deflect attention from this goal, stressing new priorities.
Latest published figures show that by the end of last October, the English lists had come down by 79,000. But already available November figures for Wales show a 2% monthly increase and no overall improvement over the position 12 months before.
Even if English hospitals maintained their improving trend during November, it is almost certain to have ended last month - when routine surgery was largely halted in preparation for any millennium problems - and to be now in sharp reverse.
Hospitals in London, Brighton, Bristol, Leeds, Nottingham and Newcastle-upon-Tyne were among those confirming yesterday that they had cancelled non-urgent surgery until further notice.
Mr Milburn said hospitals in England had dealt with more than 200,000 emergency admissions in the past three weeks - an increase of 30%. The evidence was that patients were "more ill than normal" and were staying in hospital longer than normal.
The NHS had risen to the challenge and was coping, the minister said, though it was true that services were "stretched".
Doctors' leaders joined calls for the government to acknowledge that the flu crisis had exposed a critical shortage of hospital beds. Peter Hawker, who chairs the British Medical Association's consultants' committee, said health care planning had to take proper account of the greater needs of the growing numbers of elderly people.
"It is time we stopped seeing this as an inconvenient extra pressure in winter and recognised that our assumptions about bed numbers need to be built on real need, rather than wishful thinking," he said.
The latest official figure for incidence of flu or flu-like illness in England is, provisionally, 197 people in every 100,000. Although this remains well short of epidemic levels, Liam Donaldson, the chief medical officer, has used the term "epidemic" because he says the count excludes many people not going to their doctor.
Douglas Fleming, director of the Royal College of General Practitioners' research unit responsible for the count, said the outbreak was no different from that last winter.
John Oxford, professor of virology at the Royal London hospital, agreed and said it had again exposed the NHS's inability to cope with the not entirely unexpected.
