Patients will continue to suffer on record-breaking NHS waiting lists unless more is done to separate planned and emergency care, experts have warned. New Welsh Government data has revealed that the number of patients awaiting planned non-urgent care hit record levels for the 25th month in a row.
In May there were 722,147 so-called "patient pathways" waiting for elective hospital treatment - an alarming rise of 15,000 from the 707,098 recorded in April and way up on the 456,809 seen just before the pandemic hit in March 2020. As one patient may be on several "pathways" to treatment, the number of patients affected will be lower.
In fact, newly-collected management information presented for the first time this month suggests that in March, when the national statistics reported more than 701,000 open patient pathways, there were 543,773 individual patients on treatment waiting lists in Wales.
