Five trusts responsible for over half of year-plus waiters

The elective waiting times data collated by NHS England shows 1,576 patients waiting more than a year in February, with four-fifths of them at 10 trusts (see table below).

The performance of the English NHS against the target that 92 per cent of people wait no more than 18 weeks was 90 per cent – the worst for February since 2012.

The largest specialism for patients waiting more than a year was trauma and orthopaedics with 446. General surgery had 331 patients in this category.

Kettering General Hospital Foundation Trust had 107 patients waiting more than a year for urology treatment.

The trust is significantly smaller than the other trusts in the overall top five, performing about 1,200 inpatient treatments in February, compared with 3,900 at King’s College Hospital FT and 3,000 at Imperial College Healthcare Trust.

Wye Valley Trust had the lowest performance against the 18 week target in February, with only 67.6 per cent of patients waiting less than 18 weeks.

Kettering’s chief operating officer Rebecca Brown said: “The trust has just completed a comprehensive waiting time improvement programme to ensure our waiting time data is correct.

”As a result we have reported 257 patients waiting more than 52 weeks in February 2017. Each individual patient who has waited over 25 weeks is being scheduled to be seen and we expect to have addressed this by the end of June. We very much regret these long waits and apologise to all of the patients concerned.

“We now have robust plans to continue to reduce waiting times and aim to achieve the 18 week waiting time standard by March 2018.”

Trusts with the most year-plus waiters, February 2017