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A Derby postman has spoken about his anxiety at being on the NHS waiting list for 15 months, with the UK’s health secretary dubbing his delay “totally unacceptable”. Hendrick Le Roux, 41, a Royal Mail postman who lives in Derby, suffered a hernia which he suspects was made worse due to the pressures of his active job, but ended up waiting 15 months for treatment after being referred by his GP, receiving care at Royal Derby Hospital yesterday (June 11).
Mr Le Roux, who moved to Derby from South Africa two years after finding love, said the long wait culminated in a 45-minute procedure and that recovery is due to take a number of weeks. He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: “There was just no clarity. It was a bit of a struggle.
“I didn’t know when I might need to be off work sick and for up to six weeks and I need to get that cleared with my manager. I had talked it through with my manager but then we got a new one, who didn’t know, after 13 months of waiting, and that was the worry, whether they would allow it.
“I was also worried about statutory sick pay which is just not enough to cover everything. The financial position could have been very different. I am happy to have had the operation, I am a big advocate of the NHS, especially because there is no public healthcare system in South Africa, it is all private healthcare.
“Thankfully I do not have a family or anyone depending on me but it would be different for other people and I consider myself lucky for that reason, but was very unlucky to wait this long.”
Asked how he felt during his 15-month wait, Mr Le Roux said: “The process is long and drawn out. I do have the NHS app which showed me how long I would be waiting and I would just be staring at it all the time. The anxiety was not nice and you have that building up before the procedure too and you don’t know when the procedure will be, so there is all that hesitancy.”
His advice to other people is not to delay the first step of visiting the GP to start the waiting process for treatment. He said: “Whether it is about something serious or not you should go and see them and get their opinion.
“There is always going to be a waiting list, you can’t expect to get seen within two weeks for everything so you need to get on the list and wait for your turn.
“Start the process otherwise you might just be delaying that 15-month wait.”
Wes Streeting, the UK’s secretary of state for health and social care, visited Royal Derby Hospital today (June 12). He said: “I’m not just here to bang the drum about things that are going well, I’m here to hear about the challenges as well and Derby has had its fair share of challenges in terms of getting the waiting list down.
“I must say, I am really impressed with what I have seen. I think the hospital leadership are focussing on all the right things in terms of bringing down the waiting list, they’ve focused particularly on the longest waiters, people waiting over a year like Hendrick the postie who I met this morning who was waiting 15 months for a hernia operation which I think is totally unacceptable.
“The trust are doing absolutely the right thing to focus on those long waiters. The waiting lists haven’t come down as fast in Derby, so I arrived in Derby ready to say ‘what is going on with the waiting lists, we need to go a bit faster on this’.
“Last week they went through over 2,000 patients on their waiting list. They are putting their foot down on the accelerator.
“I hope that residents across Derby know that I have got my eyes on what is going on and to be fair to the hospital leadership and the frontline staff, they are absolutely determined to bust the backlog and get people seen faster.”
