Revealed: Britain’s WORST A&E departments – where patients wait 12 hours to see a doctor as hospitals buckle under the pressure of the winter ‘quad-demic’
NHS patients in some parts of Britain are waiting at least 12 hours in A&E before seeing a healthcare provider, official data shows.
At The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust, around one in ten of those who attended A&E last month waited 12 hours.
At University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, the number of patients was 1,853 – equivalent to around one in 20 of all patients seen in November.
Meanwhile, other hospitals in the country saw only half of their patients requiring urgent care within four hours last month, well below the health system’s target of 76 percent.
It comes amid warnings from senior medics about hospitals being ‘full’ with patients as the healthcare system grapples with a ‘quad-demic’ of winter flu, Covid, norovirus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Dr. Ian Higginson of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) warned yesterday that the situation facing patients needing treatment in the NHS was ‘quite grim’.
He explained that patients are forced to wait in corridors due to a shortage of beds while ambulances queue outside, and spoke of an increased risk to the health of staff.
Dr. Higginson told Sky News: ‘Normally we would expect a bit of quiet just before Christmas. So I’m afraid it looks quite difficult for our patients and for our staff.
Senior medics have issued dire warnings that hospitals are ‘full’ with patients as the health service struggles with a ‘quad-demic’ of winter viruses such as flu. Stock image
‘We simply do not have enough beds in our hospitals for patients who are admitted urgently.
“We don’t have enough staff for those beds and we don’t have any headroom at all.”
Now a Mailonline analysis of NHS data has revealed which emergency departments in England you can expect to see the longest delays.
As well as Shrewsbury and Birmingham, the University Hospitals of Derby and Burton NHS Foundation Trust also had notable numbers of 12-hour waits – around one in every 25 patients.
With a four-hour wait time, Shrewsbury and Telford had the worst performance in the country, with 49 percent of patients not seen during this period.
In contrast, Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust performed the best of all major emergency departments, with just over 88 percent of patients seen within four hours.
This trust was also one of the few major A&Es to avoid a 12-hour wait every month.
The others were Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, Kettering General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Barnsley Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
In total, just 20 NHS trusts with a large emergency department achieved the target of seeing 76 percent of all emergency patients within four hours, around a sixth of the total.
NHS officials previously warned that data from last month, the busiest November on record, showed the strain the health service was under as it faced the pressures of what has been called a ‘quad-demic’.
The NHS’s national medical director, Professor Sir Stephen Powis, said at the time: ‘The tidal wave of flu cases and other seasonal viruses hitting hospitals is really worrying for patients and for the NHS – the figures are adding to our ‘quad-demic’. ‘to assure.’
The latest NHS data suggests that some emergency departments in England could be better placed to deal with the influx of A&Es than others. Stock image
According to health care guidelines, 76 percent of patients should be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of being checked
The latest weekly winter health service report, published just days before Christmas, found that one in 18 beds in the NHS are currently occupied by one of these pathogens.
Recently, nurses and doctors have been educated on how to treat patients in the hallways. But the RCEM labeled the guidelines as ‘normalizing the dangerous’.
The latest data comes from annual NHS figures, published earlier this year, which showed as many as 440,000 patients in England had to wait more than 12 hours in A&E.
This represented an increase of 30,000 compared to the previous year. By comparison: ten years ago only 1,200 people waited that long.
The annual data also showed that two-thirds of emergency departments in England’s worst-performing hospitals also had to wait more than four hours for care in the year to March 2024.
Full trust-by-trust results for the annual data, published in September, can be viewed via our interactive search table above.