Hospital services with biggest waiting lists at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust revealed

We have put together a gallery showing the size of the queue at the services at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust with the longest waiting lists.

The number of people waiting for routine hospital treatment has grown to 6.4 million nationally, the highest since records began in April 2007.

HEALTH: Sheffield hospital waiting lists: Nearly 2,000 waiting over a year for treatment, figures show

Trauma and orthopaedic departments have the largest waiting lists nationally, with 731,000 patients queueing for treatments such as knee and hip replacements, 55,000 of whom have been waiting over a year.

The NHS England figures, for the end of March, show the proportion of people who have been waiting for 18 weeks or less has fallen to 62.4 per cent, far below the NHS target of 92 per cent and the worst performance in more than a year.

Professor Stephen Powis, national medical director for NHS England, said hospital teams were making good progress in tackling the backlogs, with record numbers of diagnostic tests and cancer checks taking place in March, as part of what he described as “the most ambitious catch up plan in NHS history”.

But Dr Tim Cooksley, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said: “All parts of the NHS are unquestionably struggling.”

Dr Jennifer Hill, Medical Director (Operations), at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust recently said: “Our teams have worked really hard to carry out as many operations as possible over the past two years but regrettably some procedures had to be paused until the height of the pandemic subsided.

“Like all NHS Trusts this has left us with a considerable backlog and for us the number of patients is particularly high because we are one of the largest Trusts in the NHS and provide many specialist services not available elsewhere.

“We are pleased that almost three quarters of patients are being treated within 18 weeks of their referral, but we are very aware how distressing it is for people to have to wait and are doing all we can to catch up as quickly as we can, especially for those patients who have been waiting the longest.”

Here, we reveal the hospital departments at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals with the biggest waiting lists, as of March 2022 - the latest available data.

In each case, we name the service, and state the number of patients awaiting treatment.