To ask the Secretary of State for Health what the average waiting time was (a) between written referral from a general practitioner to the first out-patient appointment with a pain management consultant and (b) for patients waiting for elective admission where the main specialty is pain management in (i) England and (ii) each primary care trust in each of the last five years. (106043)

The information has been placed in the Library.

The average waiting time figures for England are shown in table 1. From April 2004, pain management was no longer a specialty in its own right, and activity will now be contained in the anaesthetic specialty.

The numbers at primary care trust level are too small to calculate an average wait accurately. Tables 2 to 9 show the numbers waiting by number of weeks waiting by PCT by year for the pain management and anaesthetics specialties.