The one area of Wales responsible for half the country's longest waiting lists

One area of Wales is struggling with tackling the longest waits for treatment on the NHS more than most. There are around 24,000 NHS patients who have been waiting more than two years for treatment in Wales.

Almost half of that number of patients are waiting under one health board which covers Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Anglesey. According to data from Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, there are also 1,481 patients waiting for more than three years, as of August.

Overall, NHS waiting times in Wales have grown each month to record-breaking levels, however, the number of people waiting more than two years has fallen 66% since 2022, according to First Minister Eluned Morgan. In an interview, Ms Morgan explained there was a "particular problem in Betsi Cadwaladr Health Board.

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In the interview published on Will Hayward Newsletter, she said: "We are looking at maybe four fifths of the problem, by the end of the spring, being in that Betsi area. Obviously we need to do what we can to stand by them, to try and address that particular issue. It is in particular areas, particular specialisms, that we need to focus on."

She added that she believes by spring, two-year-waits across Wales should be down from 24,000 to around 8,000 or so, due to the injection of £50m in funding aimed at providing weekend appointments for consultations, as well as using the private sector to carry out surgeries.

The health board's director of performance and commissioning, Stephen Powell, added that by April, the waiting list for two-year-waits should be down to around 5,000. For the latest health and Covid news, sign up to our newsletter here

"We've given a commitment to reduce the number of patients waiting more than two years to get that number down to about 5,000 by the end of this current financial year," he said. "We've had additional funds from the Welsh Government to facilitate that and we've stepped-up oversight and assistance through additional insourcing, outsourcing and commissioning on a daily basis to ensure we are moving in the right direction."

Independent board member and barrister Chris Field said that waiting times increasing in other areas was undermining the progress made. "You might well get an appointment within 100-and-something weeks but then you may have to wait the same amount of time, if not longer, to be seen again," he said.

"It's nonsense. We are at the bottom of the heap. Why should we expect the population to be anything other than indignant. We're telling them all the time it's terrible but it's not actually getting better, objectively it's getting worse."

Interim executive director of finance Russell Caldicott insisted that on extreme waiting the board was making real progress." Waiting times were going in the wrong direction only four or five months ago," he said. "We've stemmed that tide and effectively the gradient for all the graphs on extreme waiting times are on a significant downward trend."

Mr Powell agreed that the current state of affairs was unacceptable, but that the board was making progress with the patients who have been waiting longest. "At the moment we have to concentrate on the extreme long waiting lists because those patients have waited so long," he said. "Equally at the other end we've got an increasing number of patients coming onto the waiting lists as well.

"The number of patients waiting more than 50 weeks is going up and it will continue to go up. This is a long term project to stabilise the whole of the waiting list because we've got to get the whole thing back down to 36 weeks or under.

"It'll take a number of years but we've got to treat the extreme long waiters, your urgent patients and suspected cancer patients, then gradually push the whole of the waiting list back down. But it is unacceptable.

"It's a complicated situation and will take a while. There's no doubt our extreme long waiting times are coming down. We need to find ways - through service planning, demand and capacity planning efficiency and effective use of resources at all levels - to get all waiting times down.

"It's an enormous challenge. The health board is in the situation it is in and it's going to take time to fix."