PROGRESS on cutting hospital waiting times for patients in Gwent could be seriously hampered by a lack of beds and operating theatre capacity, say health chiefs.

The battle to achieve a maximum 32-week waiting time from GP referral to treatment by the end of March 2009 also poses a huge financial challenge.

A Gwent Healthcare Trust report warns of "serious questions about whether the trust has the necessary bed and theatre capacity to deliver the additional activity required."

That additional activity involves more than 8,300 treatments and almost 13,500 outpatient appointments, which means big increases on the existing workload for several specialties.

The trust predicts that overall, delivering the 32-week target will cost £37 million, yet the Assembly is allocating Gwent just £13.7m towards this during 2008/09.

The biggest worry for trust chiefs however, one that will have a big effect on costs, is capacity.

The estimated number of treatments needed next year in orthopaedics, ENT (ear, nose and throat), and ophthalmology are 82 per cent, 58 per cent and 28 per cent respectively above this year's levels.

In orthopaedics, accounting for an estimated £26m of the overall cost, Gwent's hospitals lack the capacity to deal with more than 2,600 extra operations next year.

This would leave a gap of nearly 2,000 cases that must be deal with by sending patients elsewhere for treatment, such as NHS hospitals outside Gwent, probably in England, or to private hospitals with the NHS footing the bill.

But currently, alternative capacity is only available for 1,000 of these.

The report also refers to "significant risks" in the trust being able to create the capacity to carry out the extra 2,600 orthopaedic operations it thinks it can provide.

These include uncertainty over being able to recruit locum consultants.