Dire A&E waiting times mean a QUARTER of patients in the NHS’s busiest hospitals are delayed for treatment by 12 hours… so how’s your confidence?
Worsening emergency department waiting times mean a quarter of patients needing emergency care now face 12-hour delays in England’s busiest hospitals.
Nationally, nearly 150,000 patients (11.3 percent) languished in overcrowded emergency departments for at least half a day in February alone.
Rates were above 20 per cent in nine NHS trusts across Lancashire, Cornwall and Kent.
It comes after a shocking investigation today suggested that horrendous A&E waits for hospital beds caused more than 250 unnecessary deaths a week last year, with patients forced to wait in crowded rooms and corridors or on trolleys.
The MailOnline survey found that fewer than a third of emergency department patients are seen within four hours in the country’s worst-performing trusts. In fact, one in four have to wait more than 12 hours in some NHS hospitals, illustrating the scale of the crisis, with patients forced to sleep on the floor or sit on trolleys in hospital corridors as they waited for a bed.
Dr. Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said “urgent intervention” was needed to resolve the crisis.
Experts fear the situation will only get worse as the ailing NHS is stuck in an ‘eternal winter’ amid staff shortages and unprecedented demand.
The blocking of beds – where patients able to leave hospital cannot do so due to a lack of capacity in the social care sector – and the endless calendar of strikes have only fueled the problem, insiders say.
NHS England figures for February show that 27.1 per cent of patients attending the emergency department at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust waited at least 12 hours to be seen after arriving.
Similar high levels were recorded at The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (25.1 per cent), United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust and Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (both 23.7 per cent).
By comparison, rates at Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust were just 0.6 per cent.
Based on data from 5 million patients, the RCEM calculated that one additional death occurred for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in the emergency room.
NHS statistics do not track how many victims wait at least eight hours to be seen. However, health bosses are recording delays of 12 hours.
Figures from last year show that more than 440,000 emergency patients in England waited twelve hours for treatment.
That only counts ‘trolley waits’: the time between the moment doctors decide that a patient needs to be admitted and the moment they actually get a bed.
Critics say this drastically undermines the scale of the NHS casualty crisis as patients could have arrived hours before their condition was deemed serious enough for further treatment.
When this method is used, the actual number of patients who waited 12 hours or more in the emergency department in the past year is closer to 1.6 million.
About 65 percent of wait times of this length are for a hospital bed, according to an FOI from the RCEM.
Modeling by the RCEM suggests that approximately 270 patients who had to wait 12 hours will have died as a result of the weekly wait. It was a slight improvement compared to 2022.
The figures – described as a conservative estimate – do not include the thousands of patients trapped in the backs of ambulances who are also at risk of injury.
Dr. Boyle said: ‘Extremely long wait times still leave patients at risk of serious harm.
‘Lack of hospital capacity means patients stay in A&E for longer than necessary and are cared for by emergency department staff, often in clinically inappropriate areas such as corridors or ambulances.
‘The direct correlation between delays and mortality rates is clear. Patients are exposed to avoidable harm.
‘Urgent action is needed to put people first. Patients and staff should not bear the consequences of insufficient financing and too few resources. We cannot continue to be confronted with inequality in care, avoidable delays and deaths.’
When asked about the figures today, Dr Boyle said: ‘We are now in a situation where being admitted to hospital makes people worse rather than better.’
Labour’s shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, said the figures were ‘truly shocking’.
He told GB News: “These are people’s lives. We have been warning about this and the dangerous situation in the Emergency Department for a long time.
‘This is not a danger that the government has suddenly become aware of.
“This is happening, quite frankly, because of the lack of capacity that there is now in the National Health Service.”
Furthermore, the latest NHS England data for February shows that no hospital saw all its emergency department visitors within four hours.
The original goal, set in 2010, was 95 percent.
However, eight of a total of 122 trusts met the watered-down healthcare target of 76 per cent.
This threshold was introduced in December 2022 and all trusts were expected to reach this threshold by March 2024.
In a sign of the intense pressure facing the NHS, an A&E patient in Kent last year told how he had to wait 45 hours before a ward bed became available.
Steven Wells, a 31-year-old forklift driver, vomited blood when he arrived at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, at 1am on November 13.
But he was not given a bed in a ward until November 14 at 10 p.m.
Sharing a photo of himself sleeping on the floor, Mr Wells said: ‘It really looked like a war zone at times. It makes me not want to go back to the hospital because the last time was so traumatic and embarrassing.
“You have people looking down on you, stepping all over you, and all you want is to just be taken care of.”
Steven Wells (pictured sleeping on the floor at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent) had to wait 45 hours in A&E after he started vomiting blood and was forced to sleep on the floor while he waited to be admitted
He added: “They need more full-time decent staff. There is no excuse for the way I was treated.”
An NHS spokesperson said: ‘We have seen a significant increase in demand for emergency services, with attendance in February up 8.6 per cent on last year and emergency admissions up 7.7 per cent.
‘The latest published data shows that our recovery plan for emergency and emergency care – supported by additional funding with more beds, capacity and greater use of measures such as same-day urgent care – is delivering improvements.
‘This complements ongoing work with our community and social care colleagues to discharge patients when they are medically fit to go home, freeing up beds for other patients.
‘The cause of the excess deaths is due to several factors and it is therefore right that experts at the ONS, as the executive arm of the statistical authority, continue to analyze these causes.’