To ask the Minister of Health when will Health and Social Care Trusts be able to provide updated details on waiting times for procedures such as cataract surgery and hip replacements.

Following the roll out of encompass, a significant amount of data validation has been required in each Trust and, an extensive programme of work has been put in place to assist Trusts in validating their information and improving the reporting capability.

A report has been developed on the encompass system to provide waiting times for Inpatients and Daycases primarily for the quarterly publication of statistics at specialty level. Patients waiting for individual procedures cannot be easily identified as the recording of Intended Primary Procedure Codes on encompass differs to how it was recorded on the historic Patient Administration System (PAS). Further work with Trusts, along with advice from the Regional Clinical Coding team, is required in order to utilise this regional report to accurately identify and group procedure codes appropriately. It is expected that this work will be complete by October this year.