Our teams have been working hard to reduce the time our patients wait for treatment. Despite challenges including the strike by junior doctors leading to delayed appointments, we’ve hit the NHS England (NHSE) target to reduce the number of patients waiting over 18 months to zero.

Our Chief Executive, Matthew Trainer (pictured), said: “We have worked incredibly hard to reduce to zero, by the end of March, the number of people waiting more than 18 months for their treatment.

“This is a brilliant achievement – well done to our teams who have gone above and beyond to make this happen.”

We are one of the few trusts to hit this target and are incredibly proud of how hard all our teams have worked to achieve it.

One of the key innovations which helped play a role was our Elective Surgical Hub, one of just eight in the country to receive national accreditation.

The hub is where we’ve carried out our many successful ‘Bones’ weeks, performing high volume, low complexity surgery – in some cases achieving five times the number of operations than an average week.

And many of our teams have run extra clinics and diagnostic sessions to help us meet this target and reduce our backlog.

This was a key milestone after we reduced the number of patients waiting over two years to almost zero (with the remaining patients choosing to delay for their own reasons) by June 2022. Our next target is to reduce the number of patients waiting over a year to zero by Christmas this year. This is well ahead of the NHSE deadline.

Read more about how we’re reducing our waiting lists.