NHS patients in the Midlands are seeing waiting times for surgery fall three times quicker than the national average, a new interactive dashboard shows.

• Number of Midlands patients waiting for treatment falls by more than 92,000 in the last year, a 6.5% reduction compared to the national average drop of 2.3%
• More than six in 10 patients now treated within the 18-week target – an improvement by 3.6 percentage points regionally, compared to the national improvement of 2.6 percentage points

• While number of patients waiting over a year falls by more than 40% across the Midlands, compared to 29% nationally

The Referral to Treatment Waiting Times Dashboard, launched this week, allows people to see waiting times in  hospitals across England – and track the progress of local systems working to improve the rate of treatment.

As waiting lists across the country have fallen by 2.3 per cent since last year, the Midlands region has seen waits fall by over 6.5 per cent over the same period – almost three times the national average, and more than double the next best regions (South East & North West – 3.1 per cent).

The progress came despite the NHS’s busiest ever year, with 431,000 attendances in to Midlands A&E departments in December alone.

The data reveals key insights about hospital waiting times in the largest NHS region in England:

Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals (SaTH) has slashed the number of patients waiting longer than a year for treatment by more than 97 per cent (since November 2024) and reduced the overall number of patients waiting for surgery by almost 30 per cent.

Last year University Hospitals Birmingham Trust (UHB) had 4.4k patients who had been waiting more than a year for treatment, but the dashboard shows they had reduced that figure to 1.6k by November – down almost 65 per cent in a year.

Meanwhile in the East Midlands, University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust have reduced their waiting list by 11.3  per cent since November 2024 (more than 12,000 patients) and have reduced the number of patients waiting over a year by half (51.3 per cent). The Trust has been making smarter use of available capacity by using new digital tools to improve communication with patients, to confirm whether they still need the treatment or service they were waiting for which is also reducing missed appointments.

The Dashboard has been launched on the anniversary of the government’s elective reform plan which set out a range of measures designed to improve the delivery of elective care and tackle NHS waiting list backlogs.

Dr Jess Sokolov, Regional Medical Director for the NHS England in the Midlands, said: “We’re committed to reducing waiting times for local patients not just because faster treatment offers massive improvements to quality of life. But also because we see fewer patients needing urgent and emergency care when their health deteriorates waiting for much-needed surgery.

“Across the Midlands we have been working to bring diagnostic and planned services into more convenient community locations meaning hospitals can focus on patients who need urgent and emergency care.”

In the year since the Elective Reform Plan was launched, work to cut waiting lists includes creating more evening and weekend clinics, new and expanded community diagnostic centres and surgical hubs, crack teams of experts being sent to 20 hospital trusts across England with the highest levels of economic inactivity, and cutting unnecessary appointments by sending patients “straight to test” rather than multiple clinic visits.

The government aims to cut waiting times to 18 weeks by the end of this Parliament and to treat 92 per cent of patients within 18 weeks by 2029.