Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to reduce waiting times for (a) urgent and (b) non-urgent referrals of patients from General Practice to hospitals in (i) Cumbria and (ii) England.

Cutting waiting lists is one of this Prime Minister’s top priorities. We are making good progress on tackling the longest waits, and ensuring patients get the care they need when they need it. That is why we have published the elective recovery plan, which sets clear ambitions to eliminate long waits for planned National Health Service treatment. The overall vision is to eradicate waits of longer than a year for elective care by March 2025.

To facilitate this across elective services, we are increasing activity, with plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25. This will expand capacity though creating a new network of community diagnostic centres, including three in Cumbria, and maximising all available independent sector capacity. We are managing demand through specialised advice in primary care and giving patients more control over where they receive their care. We are also increasing productivity through transforming outpatient services, developing new surgical hubs to increase theatre productivity, and working actively with trusts to support and challenge their performance.

The latest published figures show that the 62-day backlog has fallen 36% since its peak in the pandemic. The NHS introduced the Faster Diagnosis Standard (FDS), which aims to ensure patients have cancer diagnosed or ruled out within 28 days of urgent suspected cancer referral from a general practice or screening services. Latest FDS performance was at 71.9% in November 2023 against the national standard of 75%.

To achieve the FDS target, NHS England are streamlining cancer pathways, including timed cancer pathways, to speed up diagnosis in the three key cancer pathways: lower gastrointestinal, prostate, and skin.

We are also implementing non symptom specific pathways for patients who present with non-specific symptoms, or combinations of non-specific symptoms, that can indicate several different cancers.