Measures introduced over the past six months have helped reduce missed hospital appointments and cut waiting lists in several specialties, although significant pressures remain across a number of services.

This is according to Health and Social Care Minister Claire Christian, who said during Tuesday’s Tynwald sitting that reducing waiting times remained a key priority for both the DHSC and Manx Care.

She said one of the most significant improvements had been the creation of a clinic utilisation function within the Patient Information Centre to make better use of available appointments and reduce the number of patients failing to attend.

The Minister said the ‘did not attend’ rate had fallen from 11.4% to 6%, creating the equivalent of around 770 additional appointments each month.

Additional clinicians have also been appointed in gastroenterology, orthopaedics and urogynaecology, resulting in reductions in waiting lists within those specialties.

Mrs Christian also highlighted plans to expand a consultant-led clinical validation programme across all hospital services after funding was approved. The programme reviews whether patients still require treatment and remain on the appropriate care pathway.

She said early validation work had found that 43% of patients reviewed no longer required hospital treatment and had therefore been removed from waiting lists.

Despite the progress, the minister acknowledged ongoing pressures in diagnostic services and said ENT, ophthalmology, gynaecology, general surgery, dermatology, oral surgery and cardiology remained areas of particular concern.

She said additional clinicians had been recruited in several of those specialties, while extra capacity was also being commissioned.

During Tynwald, Mr Moorhouse asked why the costs associated with waiting lists were not included in the financial recovery plan and whether the Isle of Man’s position compared favourably with England.

Mrs Christian said it was not currently possible to accurately calculate the cost of waiting lists.

‘It is not currently possible to accurately cost them as we do not yet have activity-based costing,’ she said.

She added that using NHS national tariffs as a comparison would only provide an indication and ‘would not necessarily reflect the actual cost of delivery in the island’.

The Minister also warned that comparisons with England should be treated carefully because Manx Care does not currently use the same referral-to-treatment methodology.

She said NHS England figures showed around 7.28 million incomplete referral-to-treatment pathways in May 2026, equivalent to around 13% of the population.

‘Those figures are indicative only and should not be regarded as directly comparable,’ she said.

The Minister added that Manx Care had set targets to reduce the outpatient waiting list from 17,833 open referrals recorded in May 2026 to approximately 11,500 by March 2027.

Manx Care also aims to ensure 95% of patients waiting for an initial consultant-led outpatient appointment will have waited no longer than 52 weeks by March 2027, compared with 37.1% in May.

Communication with patients was another issue raised, after Ramsey MHK Lawrie Hooper described a situation where he had been told there was a two-year wait for surgery before receiving an appointment letter shortly afterwards.

‘I do believe that our digital way of doing things needs to improve,’ Mrs Christian said.