Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government which five clinical procedures have the highest average waiting time in England.

Patients have a legal right, set out in the NHS Constitution, to start consultant-led treatment within a maximum of 18 weeks from referral for non-urgent conditions. The NHS Constitution for England is attached, as is the Handbook to the Constitution, which provides a further level of detail regarding the rights and pledges. Performance is measured against an operational standard that 92% of patients who have not yet started treatment should have been waiting less than 18 weeks from referral at the end of each month. These referral to treatment waiting times are collected for 18 treatment functions (e.g. trauma and orthopaedics), but not for individual conditions or procedures. They are different from the data derived from hospital episode statistics, which show only the waiting time from decision to admit to admission, and not the waiting time from referral to start of treatment.

Table: The five treatment functions that had the highest average waiting time from referral to treatment in July 2016, in England

Source: Consultant-led referral to treatment waiting times, NHS England