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Medical Treatments: Waiting Lists

Volume 470: debated on Tuesday 22 January 2008

To ask the Secretary of State for Health what steps the Government has taken to reduce referral to treatment waiting times since 1997. (179567)

[holding answer17 January 2008]: This Government have taken a variety of steps to reduce referral to treatment (RTT) times, underpinned by record levels of investment and delivered through the hard work of national health service staff. Initially focused on reducing waits for individual stages of treatment, these include:

delivering a pledge to reduce the waiting list by 100,000. The waiting list is now at its lowest level since records began;

reducing the number of patients waiting over 13 weeks for a first out-patient appointment following general practitioner referral from over 338,000 in 1997 to less than 100 at the end of November 2007;

reducing over six month in-patient waits from over 283,000 in 1997 to 77 at the end of November 2007; and

introducing a diagnostic waiting time data collection, which has seen a reduction in the average waiting time from 6.8 weeks in April 2006 to 2.9 weeks at the end of November 2007.

These improvements have laid a solid base on which to reduce RTT times for all consultant-led elective care to a maximum of 18 weeks by December 2008. Latest data show that this pledge is already being delivered to over half of all admitted patients (patients who require admission to hospital for treatment) and over three quarters of non-admitted patients.