Reducing waiting times for patient diagnosis is a key target for health chiefs.

The Department of Health and Social Care has pledged to aim for 18-week limits to waiting times for appointments. Diagnostic appointments are among those at the head of the queue for improvement.

In the House of Keys last week, former health minister Kate Beecroft (LibVannin, Douglas South) said the waiting list for diagnostic appointments was far too long.

’If you are waiting for a decision on what is actually wrong with you it can pose a patient safety risk,’ she said.

Health Minister David Ashford said he was in ’perfect agreement’ with Mrs Beecroft.

’The diagnostics side is absolutely essential because until you actually know what is wrong with you, you are not going to start receiving the appropriate treatment,’ he said.

’So in relation to that, that is one of the first things that we will be looking at in terms of decreasing waiting time.’

Earlier, Mr Ashford reiterated the department’s target of an 18-week standard for referral to treatment, within the next five years. That would bring the Isle of Man in line with NHS England.

The minister added: ’A number of key waiting time standards have been introduced by NHS England, most notably the 18-week referral to treatment standard, also the four-hour A&E standard, the two-week wait cancer standard and the 31-day and 62-day cancer standards.

’The department has chosen to adopt these respective standards and measures performance against them on either a weekly or monthly basis, depending on the reporting requirement of the respective standard.’

He admitted the department had a lot of work to do to reach the standards.

’Waiting times for first outpatient appointments, excluding two-week cancer referrals, are currently unacceptable in my view and compared to NHS England performance the Isle of Man is a considerable outlier.’

But he pointed to improvements in the two-week target for cancer patients, which had been achieved with 89.1% of appointments for patients in the past year.

Mrs Beecroft acknowledged the improvement on the two-week cancer waiting time. But she added: ’There has been enormous progress made in that area, but there are an awful lot of other areas where the diagnostic waiting times are far too long.’

Mr Ashford said the approach to waiting times had to be taken ’holistically’ rather than risk making things worse by trying to achieve it all in one ’big bang’.