CANCER patients in Essex, including many Thurrock residents, are still facing agonising waits for referrals, diagnosis and treatment, it has been revealed.

At meeting of Thurrock Council's health and wellbeing overview and scrutiny committee in July, Healthwatch Thurrock's chief executive, Kim James, said she had been inundated with concerns from cancer patients unable to get results of possibly life-threatening cancer investigations.

Mark Tebbs, chief executive of Thurrock Community and Voluntary Services stood in for Ms James to give an update on the concerns raised about cancer referrals, wait times and timely diagnostics to the latest committee meeting on Thursday (31 August) and revealed little had changed.

Mr Tebbs said: "We've received a number of concerns from Thurrock residents regarding long waits for cancer care. In our role at Healthwatch we've been following that up, supporting residents to make complaints through the appropriate routes and then if they are unsuccessful taking up the baton on their behalf and taking it through complaints management and senior managers.

"The normal escalation routes don't seem to be manifesting responses our residents need. We are following processes that have historically worked and enabled us to get answers and progress complaints but at the moment it feels like we are just getting a lot of silence."

Mr Tebbs added: "It's concerning for us that those kind of systems and processes don't seem to be working in the way they were before. We will continue to raise concerns. We would be very concerned if this situation continued and we weren't getting the responses they need."

The committee heard patients have complained about waiting times from GP referral to initial hospital contact and then the time it takes from that contact to decisions being made around treatment.

Mr Tebbs said: "Patients are feeling they are just being left and there is this vacuum in communication. They are frustrated that their attempts to escalate concerns is just not being heard."

Healthwatch Thurrock says it has yet to be contacted by the Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, which manages Southend, Basildon and Broomfield hospitals, despite raising the concerns through official channels.

Responding at the meeting, Fiona Ryan, Managing Director at Basildon Hospital said: "My reflection at this point is we have individual patients in amongst the 6,000 per month that are referred into the hospital on the pathway that have a concern that we've got an escalation process that's not working so I equally, alongside yourselves, want to understand what we need to do to get those processes working."