North Cumbria Integrate Care (NCIC) are ‘working hard’ to reduce waiting lists which passed 40,000 for the first time.

With the overall NHS waiting list in England growing for the first time in seven months, the Royal College of Nursing said “there will be no place to hide for the next government” when it comes to bringing the figures down.

NHS England figures show 40,156 patients were waiting for non-urgent elective operations or treatment at NCIC at the end of April – up from 39,749 in March, and 35,171 in April 2023.

Of those, 1,029 (3 per cent) had been waiting for longer than a year.

The median waiting time from referral at an NHS Trust to treatment at NCICwas 14 weeks at the end of April – down from 15 weeks in March.

Nationally, 7.57 million people were waiting to start treatment at the end of April. This was up slightly from 7.54 million at the end of March and the first time the NHS waiting list has risen in seven months.

Separate figures show 1.6 million patients in England were waiting for a key diagnostic test in April – the same as in March.

At NCIC, 10,621 patients were waiting for one of 12 standard tests, such as an MRI scan, non-obstetric ultrasound or gastroscopy at this time.

Of them, 1,970 (19 per cent) had been waiting for at least six weeks.

Other figures show cancer patients across North Cumbria are not being seen quickly enough.

The NHS states 85 per cent of cancer patients with an urgent referral should start treatment within 62 days.

But NHS England data shows just 63 per cent of cancer patients urgently referred to NCIC in April began treatment within two months of their referral.

That was up from both 62 per cent in March, but up from 61 per cent in April 2023.

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A spokesperson for NCIC said: “We are working hard to reduce our waiting lists and improve our performance and have dedicated pieces of work looking at improving our outpatient processes, our theatre processes as well as our elective care processes.

“We have managed to secure extra capacity for our elective procedures, which will help reduce the waiting time particularly for the longest waits.

“To address our increased waiting times for diagnostics this we are making sure that all MRI scanners are able to run a seven day service at full capacity and we have recruited more staff to support this.

“In each of our cancer pathways, we are developing and implementing improvements such as having protected time for cancer scans.

“Embedding these improvements will take time but we do expect to see improvements over the next quarter.”