ELIMINATING waits of more than 36 weeks from referral to treatment for patients in Gwent hospitals could take until 2019 to achieve.

There has been a sizeable reduction in the amount of such waits during the year to the end of January.

But there were still 2,183 patients in Gwent who by January 31 had been waiting longer than 36 weeks – and health board chiefs are planning to reduce that figure gradually during the next two years.

Aneurin Bevan University Health Board’s integrated medium term plan (IMTP) –which plots a course for the development of health services in Gwent through to 2020 – includes proposals through which the number of patients waiting longer than 36 weeks would be cut to 500 by the end of March next year.

It is intended too, that these would be solely orthopaedic patients. This is the specialty most under strain in terms of capacity and case complexity, and has the biggest backlog.

By the end of January, more than half of those who had been waiting more than 36 weeks for treatment were orthopaedic patients (1,240).

The IMTP does not specify when during the following year such waits would be eliminated, but indicates that the aim is to have no patients waiting above 36 weeks by the end of March 2019.

At 2,183, the overall number of patients waiting above 36 weeks for treatment by the end of January was the lowest monthly figure for more than two-and-a-half years (June 2014), and more than 40 per cent down on the figure for January last year (3,805).

Ophthalmology accounted for the second highest amount of waits of longer than 36 weeks, with 443, though this was a reduction of almost two-thirds on January 2016 and was the lowest in this specialty since October 2014.

Reductions in such waits in orthopaedics and ophthalmology have been in part fuelled by the provision of hundreds of operations at the NHS treatment centre in Bristol during the past two years, and this is likely to continue.

The NHS Wales target is for no patients to have to wait more than 36 weeks from referral to treatment, though capacity and budget constraints have meant that this has not been consistently met in Gwent since 2011/12, and across Wales for even longer.