North East and North Cumbria’s NHS Integrated Care Board met on Tuesday September 30 at the Durham Centre.

Integrated Care Boards (ICB) oversee health and care services in their area, ensuring that enough provision is in place to meet the needs of the population.

Members were given a presentation on the performance of the 11 NHS trusts operating in North East and North Cumbria, with a focus on waiting times for treatment.

Chief Strategy Officer Jacqueline Myers, presenting her report at the North East and North Cumbria ICB meeting on Tuesday(Image: Newsquest)

It follows a letter from the Chief Executive of NHS England, setting expectations to eliminate 52 week waits by the end of March and 65 week waits by the end of December.

Cancer treatment times are also an area of concern as providers are carrying out 69.7 per cent of cancer treatments within 62 days, this is lower than the ICB’s target of 76.8 per cent.

North East and North Cumbria providers met a standard of faster diagnoses in 74.5 per cent of cases, this was lower than the national benchmark of 76.6 per cent.

ICB members also received a presentation on waiting lists in the community.

They heard that three services were responsible for almost two thirds of the community services waiting list in the region.

West Cumberland Hospital in Whitehaven(Image: Newsquest)

Ms Myers said: “There are 44 different service lines across the eight providers in our community waiting list but as you can see here, 64 per cent of those waits relate to three specific services, so these are the big chunks of the community waiting list.”

June saw 25,358 adults waiting for musculoskeletal services, while 12,432 were waiting for podiatry and podiatric surgery.

The service with the third highest number of waits was physiotherapy with 9,225 adults and 1,643 children.

However, Ms Myers said: “Really nice to see, overall across the North East and North Cumbria, our four hour performance exceeding 80 per cent, our category two response times for ambulance service still remaining strong.”

She added that, although it is still not a stable trend, North East and North Cumbria kept 12 hour A&E waits to 3.4 per cent, significantly lower than the 7.5 per cent national average.