Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department has taken steps to tackle waiting times at Queen’s Hospital in Romford.

The National Health Service has published the ‘Delivery plan for tacking the COVID-19 backlog of elective care’ to set out how hospitals will tackle waiting times and eliminate waits longer than a year for elective care by March 2025. The Government has made £8 billion available to support these plans for more checks, scans, outpatient appointments, procedures, and investment in staff.

The Queen’s Hospital is treating the most clinically urgent patients, using the independent sector to reduce long waits, and has resumed routine surgery and face-to-face outpatient appointments to supplement virtual consultations. It is part of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, which reduced the number of patients waiting more than a year from 2,430 in March 2021 to 959 in December with evening and weekend super-clinics, state-of-the-art diagnostic equipment and streamlined ways of working.