Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, which appointments will count towards the plan to deliver 40,000 more NHS appointments a week.

Tackling waiting lists is a key part of our Health Mission, and we will deliver an additional 2 million operations, scans, and appointments during our first year in Government, which is equivalent to 40,000 per week, as a first step in our commitment to ensuring that patients can expect to be treated within 18 weeks.

Appointments will be defined as those in scope of the Value Weighted Activity metric, which is used to measure elective activity as set out in NHS Operational Planning guidance, together with the key diagnostic times from diagnostic waiting times statistics. Value Weighted Activity includes elective ordinary admissions and day cases, outpatient first appointments, and outpatient follow-up appointments with a procedure. This excludes outpatient appointments without procedure, to ensure that the appointments we are counting are high value for patients. Elective admissions for endoscopies are also excluded to avoid the double counting of diagnostics.

Further information about the delivery of the additional appointments will be published at the earliest opportunity.