Health chiefs have not ruled out turning to the private sector for operations to meet tough targets on hospital waiting lists.

Crunch meetings are being held in the next few days between Bradford Health Authority, which buys in hospital care, and the trusts which run hospitals in Bradford and Airedale.

And Paul Smith, health authority director of planning, said cash was earmarked to help to clear waiting lists. Talks taking place with the trusts would decide whether local hospitals could cope with the demand and hit the targets within two months.

A report to the health authority revealed 94 people living in the district have been waiting more than 12 months for surgery.

And more than 4,000 patients have been waiting more than 13 weeks for their first non-urgent out-patient appointment. The health authority has to hit a target of 2,798 patients waiting more than three months by the end of March.

Mr Smith told a board meeting of the health authority: "We have still got a very sizeable target to reach in terms of meeting the out-patient waiting list target for over-13-week waiters."

But he said that this year's waiting list figures were far better than they had been at the same time last year.

A total of 11,267 Bradford residents are now on waiting lists for operations at a variety of hospitals, including some in Leeds, Manchester, Oxford and London.

Pressures of the flu outbreak around Christmas and Millennium had taken a toll, said Mr Smith, particularly at Airedale General Hospital, where routine surgery had been suspended during the holiday period but had not restarted as planned on January 4 because of flu victims blocking surgical beds.

Stopping non-urgent operations for the festive period had meant a backlog of patients waiting for surgery, pushing up waiting lists.

Figures for the financial year since April show there have been more people waiting than the authority had planned for every month since May.

And authority vice-chairman Christine Parkinson said the pattern - which saw waiting lists rise in the winter, necessitating emergency spending of cash to hit targets by the end of the financial year in March - had to be tackled.

Mr Smith said work was going on to find alternative ways of managing waiting lists rather than the hospitals being forced to run weekend and evening operating and out-patient sessions to clear the waiting lists.

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