NHS waiting lists show no signs of falling in the North East - and there are now more than 210,000 waiting for treatment across five hospital trusts.
The Government has set out an Elective Recovery Plan, which is supposed to lay the groundwork to tackle rocketing waiting lists.
But MPs in the North East have questioned how effective this will be, and hospital leaders like Dame Jackie Daniel at Newcastle Hospitals have warned it'll be challenging to meet some of the targets as they've been set out.
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Newcastle Hospitals is the NHS Trust with the biggest backlog in the region, this is partly due to its size and also because as a tertiary centre it takes on many of the most complicated cases across the North.
The latest NHS stats, which cover January, show that the Trust's waiting list grew again over the month - which of course saw Omicron hit hospital operations and staffing hard.
There are now 94,487 people waiting for treatment in total. That's up from 93,343 at end of December, although 69.4% of those people have been waiting less than the 18 week target set out in national guidance. are within 18 weeks.
In March 2020, before the pandemic's impact began to be felt, there were around 65,000 people waiting for treatment in Newcastle's hospitals.
The numbers of people who have been waiting more than a year (3,829) and more than two years (226) both have fallen though, continuing the pattern seen over the last six months.
The biggest single contributor to Newcastle's waiting list is ophthalmology - In January there were more than 14,000 people waiting for procedures relating to their eyes.
The Trust has, in the past year, rolled out a number of measures as it hopes to tackle the long waiting lists - these include the opening of the Newcastle Westgate Cataract Centre and plans to open a new day-case surgery unit at the Freeman Hospital later this year.
Last week, Dame Jackie Daniel said the Trust's "first priority" had to be people who'd waited more than two years - though she said there were "real challenges" to be overcome to meet the Government's plan to tackle waits of that length by July.
She said: "I didn’t think I would ever see such long waiting again in my NHS career and although the reasons for these delays are understandable, I know they make every one of us uncomfortable.
"I want to acknowledge the huge amounts of effort going into supporting these patients, and we have seen great progress from that hard work."
The hospital leader said, as has been the case since the impact of the pandemic began to be felt, "most" of the patients to have waited more than two years are waiting for "either complex ophthalmology care, spinal deformity surgery or neurosurgery".
Though Newcastle's waiting list is the largest in our region, each of the other hospital trusts remains beset with more people waiting than was common before the pandemic.
In Gateshead, there are 10,505 people waiting for treatment at the QE - and 51 of those have been waiting more than a year. Pre-pandemic, there were 8,590.
Most people, more than 2,000, are waiting for general surgical procedures.
At the South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Trust, 44,577 people are waiting for treatment. That's around 6,000 people more than in March 2020 (37,174) and the biggest contributor is, like in Newcastle, ophthalmology. That speciality accounts for 7,288 people.
And in Northumberland and North Tyneside, the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Trust - while still the best performing Trust in the region when it comes to the proportion of people who have been waiting less than 18 weeks (87.7%) - still has 28,543 people on its waiting list.
That is around also around 23,815 who were waiting in March 2020. The biggest contributor to waiting list pressures at that trust is again general surgery, which accounts for 6,300 people.
At County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust, 32,152 on the waiting list. The biggest single speciality contributing to this is trauma and orthopaedic surgery, with 5,871 people waiting for that kind of NHS treatment. In March 2020, around 10,000 fewer people were waiting (22,521).
Commenting on behalf of all NHS providers in the region, Ken Bremner MBE, Chief Executive of South Tyneside and Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust, said:
"Despite the tough start to 2022 with Omicron and significant staff absences, our waiting times across the region have remained above the England average.
"We continue to see a reduction in those people waiting more than 52 weeks for planned treatments and that is a result of the significant efforts of our NHS teams in all parts of our system. Our priority is to get people treated as quickly as we can and we are working collectively across the region to manage the backlog we have as a result of the pandemic."
This week, in a speech laying out what he called plans to "reform" the NHS, Health Secretary Sajid Javid said: "Our ‘Road to Recovery’ begins with tackling the Covid backlog, because we want to prevent worse outcomes for people waiting the longest. Our plan is to recover elective services over the coming years, so that by March 2024, 99 percent of people are waiting less than a year.
"But it’s just as important we prevent new people from joining waiting lists, by putting as much effort as we can in keeping people well, before they get ill. The irrefutable logic is to act now, to stop risks and costs building up in the future.
"The NHS Long Term Plan heralded new programmes to help prevent and manage diabetes and other long term health conditions, and greater action to tackle smoking and obesity, for example. But we still have an enormous way to go."
