Slight fall in number of Wigan hospital patients awaiting treatment
Waiting lists for routine treatments at Wigan hospitals are getting shorter – albeit slowly.
While NHS England praised its staff who "pulled out all the stops to treat a record number of patients in any June", health professionals have expressed concerns over treatment waiting times nationwide.
NHS England figures show 49,368 patients waiting for non-urgent elective operations or treatment at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) centres at the end of June – down from 50,200 in May, and 56,716 in 2024.
Of those, 1,821 (four per cent) had been waiting for longer than a year.
The median waiting time from referral at an NHS Trust to treatment at WWL facilities was 15 weeks at the end of June – up from 14 weeks in May.
Nationally, 6.23 million people were waiting to start 7.37 million treatments at the end of June — up from 7.36 million treatments and just under 6.23 million at the end of May.
NHS England said this is due to more patients being referred, despite record numbers of people receiving care.
Waiting lists last increased in March before falling for two consecutive months.
Dr Becks Fisher, director of research and policy at the Nuffield Trust, warned "the NHS is struggling to keep pace with demand" as treatment waiting lists remain "stubbornly high".
She said the reported numbers of treatments waiting to take place "only show part of the picture", adding previous waiting list reductions "are not wholly due to increases in appointments being delivered" but also to patients coming off the list for other reasons than getting treatment.
"We need more transparent reporting otherwise the waiting list is an incomplete picture of how the NHS is dealing with the backlog."
Separate figures show 1.7 million patients in England were waiting for a key diagnostic test in June – the same as in May.
At WWL hospitals 13,484 patients were waiting for one of 14 standard tests, such as an MRI scan, non-obstetric ultrasound or gastroscopy at this time.
Of them, 4,091 (30 per cent) had been waiting for at least six weeks.
Other figures show WWL cancer patients are not being seen quickly enough.
The NHS states 85 per cent of cancer patients urgently referred by a GP should start treatment within 62 days.
But NHS England data shows just 73 per cent of patients urgently referred by the NHS who received cancer treatment at WWL facilities in June began treatment within two months of referral.
That was down from 76 per cent in May, but up from 72 per cent in 2024 last year.
Prof Pat Price, leading oncologist and chair of Radiotherapy UK, said: "Today’s cancer waiting time figures lay bare the critical state of cancer care in the UK.
"Nearly a year on from Lord Darzi’s report, which found that UK cancer care 'still lags behind other countries', there are still deeply worrying signs that the Government has not grasped the scale of the challenge."
She warned many patients are still waiting too long for radiotherapy, and said she regretted the Government's recent decision to cut the £15.5m AI funding promised to radiotherapy departments last year by the Conservatives.
She said: "Radiotherapy is a proven, cost-effective, and highly personalised treatment that has been overlooked by policymakers for far too long.