Scotland is getting results from its new legally-binding Treatment Time Guarantee (TTG), which guarantees that eligible inpatients and daycases will start treatment within 12 weeks of being added to the waiting list. The number of over-12-week-waiters on the list fell, for the first quarter in nearly 2 years, to levels not seen since December 2011.

However over-12-week waiters on the outpatient waiting list, which are subject only to a non-legally-binding target, continue to rise rapidly.

All data in this post comes from ISD Scotland, and I have excluded Lothian Health Board throughout (they would totally dominate the picture otherwise: they were caught with terrible long-waits but have been turning things around since).

If you do look up the original data tables you should be aware that the inpatient & daycase data is rather confusing at the moment. The TTG only applies to those patients added to the list after 1 October 2012 (and there are exclusions), so in the following chart I have added together the pre- and post-October data series in the hope of getting (reasonably) consistent data.

Over 12 week waiters still on list