Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the number of people waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment for (a) wet macular degeneration and (b) glaucoma in (i) England, (ii) Merseyside and (iii) Liverpool.

The classification codes required to identify pathways where patients may have glaucoma or macular degeneration do not allow for distinction between the two conditions. The following table provides an estimate of the number of patients who have been waiting longer than 18 weeks for treatment specifically for wet macular degeneration and glaucoma in England, Merseyside, and Liverpool, via the latter’s integrated care boards (ICBs), as a snapshot for the week ending 27 April 2025, extracted on 8 May 2025:

Source: Waiting List Minimum Data Set, NHS England.

However, these figures may include patients that also have other conditions, as full coding for glaucoma and macular degeneration procedures requires diagnostic codes that are not available in the Waiting List Minimum Data Set.