How bad are emergency room delays at YOUR local hospital? Use our exclusive search tool to find out, as NHS services approach full capacity
A shocking one in three patients seeking emergency care in some UK hospitals can expect to wait at least 12 hours vital treatment, according to an analysis by MailOnline.
The worst offender is Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where just under a third of emergency care patients in hospitals waited 12 hours or more last month.
Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust came in second with 26.6 per cent of patients experiencing extreme delays, followed by Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, where this figure stands at 25 per cent.
The best performing trust was Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, where just 0.4 percent of patients wait more than twelve hours to see a healthcare provider.
This was followed by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London – 1.7 per cent of patients – and University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust, where the share is 2.1 per cent.
MailOnline carried out an in-depth analysis of the latest NHS A&E waiting times data and found that the true figure for the number of patients facing excruciating delays could be three times higher than the health service’s estimate.
Nearly 520,000 patients will experience delays of more than 12 hours in 2024, according to a recently released NHS report.
But our research found that this number drastically undermines the shocking reality of the victims’ crisis, with the true estimate likely being closer to 1.75 million.
That’s because NHS analyzes only measure so-called ‘trolley waits’: the time between the time a doctor decides a patient needs to be admitted to hospital and the time they get a bed.
MailOnline can now reveal how long patients can expect to wait from the moment they arrive at A&E to the moment healthcare providers decide the best course of treatment.
Our exclusive tool uses this data to allow you to see how many patients waiting at least 12 hours are in your local emergency room.
Our analysis follows a harrowing report from NHS nurses warning that staff are so overburdened that dead patients are lying undiscovered in A&E for hours.
Frontline nurses said a severe shortage of beds was leaving sick Britons in ‘animal’ conditions, stranded in hospital car parks, cupboards and toilets.
The report, which was based on a survey of NHS nurses, found that 67 percent provide care in overcrowded or unsuitable places on a daily basis.
About 91 percent said the care was unsafe.
Some said they had cared for as many as 40 patients in one hallway — some blocking emergency exits or parking next to vending machines.
One nurse specifically recalled how she “broke” after seeing the lack of care a 90-year-old woman with dementia was exposed to.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which describes the emergency department at Blackpool Victoria Hospital as ‘one of the busiest in the country’, had the highest proportion of patients waiting 12 hours in the country
“It’s what broke me to see that lady, scared and subjected to animal conditions. At the end of that shift, I resigned because I no longer had a job,” she said.
Responding to the report, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told MPs yesterday that so-called ‘corridor care’, where patients cannot be given a bed, was ‘undignified’, but warned that patients were likely to continue to suffer from this into next winter will have.
Waiting for long periods of time for care is not only inhumane, but can also cost lives.
An earlier analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine suggested that 12-hour waits would cause more than 250 unnecessary deaths per week by 2023.
Although our analysis extends to the end of December last year, other data suggests that the first few weeks of 2025 were no better for the NHS.
Figures published today show the health service is near capacity, operating at 96 percent of bed capacity last week, as hospitals buckle under the weight of a ‘quad-demic’ of winter viruses.
According to experts, 92 percent capacity is the point at which the performance of the staff caring for patients decreases.
A combination of flu, norovirus, RSV and Covid cases requiring hospital care are believed to be causing the crisis.
Figures show that last week alone, almost 5,000 beds were occupied every day by flu patients, 3.5 times more than in the same week last year.
Norovirus numbers, which had fallen in recent weeks during the winter, have risen again – almost 50 percent higher than expected for this time of year.
The NHS’s clinical director for urgent care warned that hospitals were ‘overcrowded’ and staff were facing their busiest week yet this winter.