High-quality, life-saving and life-changing care is provided every day by hard-working NHS staff throughout Wales in the face of continued pressures on services.
Despite record levels of demand, these figures show positive progress in cancer care, ambulance response time and emergency department performance.
But there is much more to do – the public rightly want to see waiting times come down and faster access to care and treatment.
These figures show more than 2,000 people started treatment for cancer in July – the second highest figure on record – and almost 16,000 people received the good news they didn’t have cancer, the highest figure on record.
Today, I will be visiting the breast cancer centre of excellence at Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr, which has benefitted from nearly £11m of Welsh Government funding, to see how the NHS is improving cancer care and reducing waiting times.
There was an improvement in response times to the most serious 999 calls in August and a welcome fall in the number of people spending more than 12 hours in emergency departments before admission or discharge.
These figures also show a reduction in long waits for diagnostic tests and therapies. However, it is disappointing the number of long waits for referral to treatment has increased for the fourth month, despite previously falling for 24 consecutive months.
While the trend in long waits has shown a recent increase, we have seen continuous improvements in previously very challenging areas such as orthopaedics, with two-year waits continuing to fall across all health boards over the last year.
A new statistical report is also being published today setting out individual health boards’ performance against a range of NHS performance measures.
I expect to see health boards learning from each other, so that those with further to go in delivering a particular service adopt and adapt good practice from those who have made better progress – and so we get better at spreading the best approaches quickly across Wales.
