Almost half of all NHS patients in Wales waiting over two years for treatment live in North Wales, according to the latest figures from Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB).

And while long-term waiting lists are stabilising - with ambitions plans to halve them in the next five months - overall waiting lists continue to grow.

Across the country there are around 24,000 NHS Wales patients waiting for more than two years for treatment, with 10,329 of them living in Wrexham, Flintshire, Denbighshire, Conwy, Gwynedd and Anglesey.

The number of patients on the BCUHB extreme long waiting list - three years or more - has fallen since July from 1,807 to 1,491, while the number of patients waiting two years or more has stabilised over the same period.

That was thanks in part to a £7.3m injection of cash from the Welsh Government to tackle extreme waiting times.

Now Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board's Director of Performance and Commissioning, Stephen Powell, has pledged that by April next year the two-year waiting list will be cut to around 5,000.

"We've given a commitment to reduce the number of patients waiting more than two years to get that number down to about 5,000 by the end of this current financial year," he said.

"We've had additional funds from the Welsh Government to facilitate that and we've stepped-up oversight and assistance through additional insourcing, outsourcing and commissioning on a daily basis to ensure we are moving in the right direction."

But independent board member and barrister Chris Field said that waiting times increasing in other areas was undermining the progress made.

"You might well get an appointment within 100-and-something weeks but then you may have to wait the same amount of time, if not longer, to be seen again," he said.

"It's nonsense. We are at the bottom of the heap. Why should we expect the population to be anything other than indignant. We're telling them all the time it's terrible but it's not actually getting better, objectively it's getting worse."

Interim Executive Director of Finance Russell Caldicott insisted that on extreme waiting the board was making real progress.

"Waiting times were going in the wrong direction only four or five months ago," he said. "We've stemmed that tide and effectively the gradient for all the graphs on extreme waiting times are on a significant downward trend."

Mr Powell agreed that the current state of affairs was unacceptable, but that the board was making progress with the patients who have been waiting longest.

"At the moment we have to concentrate on the extreme long waiting lists because those patients have waited so long," he said. "Equally at the other end we've got an increasing number of patients coming onto the waiting lists as well.

"The number of patients waiting more than 50 weeks is going up and it will continue to go up. This is a long term project to stabilise the whole of the waiting list because we've got to get the whole thing back down to 36 weeks or under.

"It'll take a number of years but we've got to treat the extreme long waiters, your urgent patients and suspected cancer patients, then gradually push the whole of the waiting list back down. But it is unacceptable.

"It's a complicated situation and will take a while. There's no doubt our extreme long waiting times are coming down. We need to find ways - through service planning, demand and capacity planning efficiency and effective use of resources at all levels - to get all waiting times down.

"It's an enormous challenge. The health board is in the situation it is in and it's going to take time to fix."