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NHS leaders have warned that Royal Mail’s plans to cut second-class deliveries to two days a week could risk patient safety.
The changes are part of wider measures announced by Royal Mail’s parent company, International Distributions Services (IDS), including cuts of up to 9,000 routes, which could take more than two years to implement, saving £300m a year. IDS has assured the Royal Mail workforce that there will be no compulsory redundancies and they will request only 100 voluntary redundancies.
In a letter sent to the Telegraph, executives from the NHS, Healthwatch England, the Patients Association and National Voices said the Royal Mail proposals would increase the cost of missed appointments, which already exceeds £1bn.
The letter said: “Provisional Healthwatch data suggest that more than 2 million people may have missed medical appointments in 2022-23 due to late delivery of letters, and this will only deteriorate under the proposed new plans.”
The health leaders added that a solution must be found to prioritise the enormous volume of correspondence sent from NHS teams and ease the disruption for health staff and other patients, “otherwise, more people will miss time-critical appointments, appointment changes or vital test results”.
New data indicates that late-arriving letters are responsible for 25% of missed hospital appointments. A range of NHS letters, including critical appointments, treatment plans and test results, rely on second-class stamps.
Late letters are a further strain on NHS waiting lists, which number as many as 9.7 million people, according to data from the Office for National Statistics released this week.
Sir Julian Hartley, the chief executive of NHS Providers, said the proposed delays were “extremely unhelpful”.
“It’s really important that patients be updated at the earliest opportunity on developments in their care and treatment,” he said.
“An efficient, punctual postal service remains a key part of that process. At a time when far too many patients already face long delays – the last thing any trust leader wants – anything that adds to that uncertainty, and possibly the worsening of conditions, would be extremely unhelpful.”
Jacob Lant, the chief executive of health charity National Voices, said: “The proposals being consulted on risk further delaying vital communications and worsening digital exclusion, therefore unfairly widening health inequalities. NHS mail must remain a priority service.”
A Royal Mail spokesperson said: “We know how important receiving NHS letters is to many people. When letter volumes have declined from 20bn in 2004-5 to just 7bn today, it is vital that the universal service is reformed so that we can protect the one-price-goes-anywhere service that many organisations, including the NHS, rely on.
“We have invested significant time understanding in detail what our customers want from universal service reform. We have talked to over 3,500 customers, SMEs and large businesses and met with a range of organisations and have spoken with different parts of the NHS, including NHS trusts and NHS representative organisations including Healthwatch England.
“The NHS is made up of hundreds of different trusts and thousands of GPs as well as other services, each with varied requirements. We will continue to offer a choice of service levels and prices to suit their needs. We are working with a range of NHS bodies to explore options for time-sensitive medical letters as part of our proposals, such as distinctively marked envelopes, use of barcodes and adapting our existing hybrid product (used by a third of GPs) as part of our proposals.”
The postal regulator, Ofcom, has produced a series of options for the postal service. These include cutting service days from six to three days and a more expensive service for next-day deliveries. Ofcom is expected to continue to discuss the proposals with industry and publish an update in the summer.
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