St Neots woman waits a year for NHS follow-up appointment after endometriosis surgery

A woman who has been waiting more than a year for a follow-up appointment after having major surgery said it has left her feeling scared and anxious.

Abbie Stapleton, 27, from St Neots in Cambridgeshire had an operation for her endometriosis at the end of 2020 but is still waiting for a face-to-face follow-up appointment.

"You get your hopes up when you receive a letter through the door saying you've got an appointment in June," she told ITV News Anglia.

"Then it gets cancelled and you feel that you've got another day to get through, of pain, another month of pain, and it's just awful. It's not only physically hard on your body, but it's really mentally draining as well," she said.

Ms Stapleton said she still faced daily discomfort and pain and had struggled not having communication with medical professionals.

"I think the hardest thing for me was just anxiety after coming out of hospital, not having any follow-up appointments until it got to six months," she said.

"Six months is a very long time to wait knowing that you've had major extensive surgery and you don't know what the next steps are. You don't know how your recovery is going to go. It's very uncertain and very scary," said Ms Stapleton.

It comes as waiting lists in the UK are still high, with more than two million people waiting more than 18 weeks for treatment.

According to the British Medical Association there have been 4.13 million fewer elective procedures during the pandemic.

Across the Anglia region, hospitals have seen waiting times grow as their resources are focused on handling the pandemic.

The East Suffolk and North Essex NHS Foundation Trust which runs Colchester and Ipswich hospitals has said that patients waiting for general surgery could wait more than 60 weeks for surgery.

Peterborough Hospital has also postponed all of its elective surgery to concentrate on urgent and cancer operations.

Dr Kanchan Rege, chief medical officer, North West Anglia NHS Foundation Trust said that postponing elective surgeries was a difficult decision.

"We really feel sad about this. It's very unfortunate because, it's better to tackle medical problems early, you can intervene less intensively, and the result is usually better," said Dr Rege.

"So leaving things is not good for patients. And it's not good for clinicians because there's more work to be done."

Hospital bosses have estimated that Cambridgeshire will reach the peak of this wave of Covid in the next two weeks, but said it would take years to catch up on all the other cases pushed back by the pandemic.