Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what effective measures they propose to take to cut the waiting time of patients waiting for NHS treatment, and in particular to address the number of patients waiting more than a year.

Cutting waiting lists is one of the Government’s priorities. The Government has committed more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to drive up and protect elective activity. This is supported further by £5.9 billion investment in capital for new beds, equipment and technology.

New and expanded surgical hubs are being rolled out to increase capacity and activity, focusing on providing high volume low complexity surgery, which is backed by £1.5 billion capital funding. There are currently 93 elective surgical hubs that are operational across England.

From October 2023, all patients waiting over 40 weeks where a decision to treat a patient has been made but the patient has not received a date for their treatment will be able to initiate a request to transfer to another provider and receive treatment more rapidly via the Patient Initiated Digital Mutual Aid System.

We have met our target to virtually eliminate long waits of two years or more for elective procedures in July 2022, and significantly reduced the number of patients waiting 18 months or more by April 2023 by over 91% from the peak in September 2021. We have now moved our focus to cutting waits of 65 weeks or more to as near zero as possible, by March 2024.

Capacity is being sought across the National Health Service and the independent sector locally, regionally and across the country to support efforts in hitting this target.