Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care , said:
“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.”
