Northern Ireland cancer waiting times (31-day standard)
Published by Department of Health (Northern Ireland) · Official source
Update schedule
- Quarterly (published roughly one quarter after the period).
Level of detail
- HSC Trust (Health and Social Care Trust)
What we show
- The share of patients whose first cancer treatment began within 31 days of the decision to treat, per HSC Trust — NI's Ministerial target is 98%
- The number of patients treated, and the number treated within 31 days, in the latest quarter (the latest three treatment months combined)
Caveats
- Northern Ireland runs its health service separately from England, Scotland and Wales and measures cancer waits on its own basis, so these figures are NOT comparable across nations and are never ranked together.
- The 31-day standard is a LATER-STAGE, decision-to-treatment measure — the wait from the decision to treat to the start of first treatment. It is not a referral-to-treatment time and should not be read as one.
- NI's 62-day referral-to-treatment standard (the wait from an urgent suspected-cancer referral to first treatment) is NOT published per HSC Trust in these data tables, so only the 31-day figure is shown here.
- Reported per HSC Trust, not per hospital. This dataset has no DPC row, so the Northern Ireland-wide figure is simply the sum of the five geographic trusts (Belfast, Northern, South Eastern, Southern and Western).
- We parse the '31 Day Wait by HSC Trust' sheet and combine the latest three treatment months into one quarter; a separate tumour-site breakdown in the same publication is not ingested.
- Patient numbers are small at trust level and vary quarter to quarter, so the counts are shown alongside the percentage. This measure never appears in a ranking or league table.
Reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains public sector information.