NHS activity and performance activity statistics show just under 709,700 RTT patient pathways waiting to start treatment, an increase of around 11,300 since June.

Cabinet minister for health and care, Mabon ap Gwynfor said: ‘These figures are disappointing and performance is not where we want it to be. The inherited waiting list backlog remains too high, and tackling it remains our top priority.'

There were about 555,200 individual patients on treatment waiting lists.
The proportion of pathways waiting less than 26 weeks decreased to 65.7% in July. The number of pathways waiting longer than 36 weeks increased to just over 172,400.

Just over 4,700 pathways were waiting more than two years, 93.3% lower than the peak and an increase of 649 (15.9%) from the previous month.

The average time patients had been waiting for treatment at the end of July was 0.4 weeks longer than the previous month at 16.3 weeks.

Provisional data for August indicate an increase in total pathways waiting and an increase in pathways waiting more than 2 years.

Plaid Cymru pledged to eliminate two-year NHS waits ‘within a matter of months' after winning May's Senedd elections.

There were just over 12,500 pathways waiting longer than one year for their first outpatient appointment, an increase from the previous month, and 87.8% less than the peak in August 2022.

In August there were just under 97,700 attendances to all emergency departments, an average of 3,151 attendances per day; this was 204 fewer attendances per day on average than in the previous month.

Performance against the four-hour target worsened but improved against the twelve-hour target when compared with the previous month.

The average time spent in emergency departments was longer than the previous month at 2 hours and 58 minutes.

The Government has pledged to bring the overall waiting list down to pre-pandemic levels before the end of this Senedd term.