Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government why consultant-led community services activity is no longer to be recorded on the main elective waiting list.

Most community activity is non-consultant led and therefore reported outside of the Referral to Treatment (RTT) dataset. There were inconsistencies in the previous reporting of consultant-led community services, so to improve consistency and accuracy of reporting across community services, the referral-to-treatment guidance has been updated to clarify the reporting expectations for consultant-led community data.

This change allows for consolidated reporting of consultant-led and non-consultant-led community services data within published community datasets. The aim is to encourage more consistent and accurate reporting across elective pathways, enabling better insights into community services and activity across the country. Patient rights to treatment within 18 weeks for consultant led services will not change under this proposal and long waits will still be visible within the published statistics; they will simply appear in the community data and not RTT.