Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care Jeremy Miles, said:
This week, we’ve increased the amount of funding to support health boards reduce the longest waiting times to £50m.
This is an extra £22m, on top of the £28m I announced last month. It will enable health boards to increase capacity in the NHS in Wales and use the private sector, where available.
As part of this £50m package of investment, £3m will go towards cutting the longest waiting times for children’s neurodevelopmental assessments as part of wider work to transform services.
I’m pleased to see the number of patient pathways waiting more than a year and two years for treatment have fallen in the last month.
This shows positive progress is being made across Wales to reduce the longest waiting times. I hope to see this continue.
While there has been a small rise in the overall number of patient pathways waiting to start treatment, more than half are waiting less than 26 weeks and there was a fall in the number waiting more than 36 weeks in September.
We recognise the impact long waits for treatment can have on someone’s life, both mentally and physically, so we have a laser-like focus on reducing the longest waits and improving access to patient care.
More than 1,800 people started cancer treatment in September and nearly 14,000 people received the good news they didn’t have cancer.
There were also reductions in the long waits for both diagnostics and therapies services and some reductions in the numbers of pathway of care delays.
Urgent and emergency care services continue to be under great pressure – in October, the Welsh Ambulance Service received the second highest number and proportion of immediately life-threatening calls per day on record, but more than half of these calls received a response within eight minutes.
The extra £50m to reduce long waits will mean more people will be seen and treated by the NHS between now and the end of March and I want to thank health boards and local authorities for embracing the 50-day challenge to speed up hospital discharge and ensure people can recover from their illness or injury in the comfort of their own home.