The horrifying truth about waiting in A&E: Study shows 12-hour delays are THREE TIMES worse than NHS bosses claim
Serious delays in emergency care are drastically underexposed by official figures.
Nearly 520,000 patients had to wait 12 hours in 2024, according to key NHS statistics.
But this only tracks the wait for the trolley: the time between when doctors decide a patient needs to be admitted to a ward and when they get a bed.
Figures showing when patients actually arrived at A&E show that 1.75 million people waited 12 hours to be seen last year, MailOnline can reveal.
In England’s busiest hospitals, a quarter of patients seeking emergency care are not admitted or discharged within that time.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (FT) was the worst offender in December, with 27.5 per cent of A&E patients waiting 12 hours.
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Rates also exceeded a quarter at both the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS FT (26.6 per cent) and Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS FT (25 per cent).
Excluding specialist facilities, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT fared best for victims who had to wait half a day or more (1.7 per cent).
The full results of MailOnline’s trust-by-trust analysis are embedded in a search function so you can see how your A&E is doing.
The little-known statistics, published by NHS England, track arrival – the moment a patient is registered in the system as needing emergency care.
The clock stops when the patient has left – when he or she has been admitted to a ward, transferred to a nursing home or discharged.
Main statistics from health chiefs, glossing over the reality of horrendous A&E queues, look at the time between doctors deciding the patient needs to be admitted and when they actually get a bed.
This discounts the hours they may have spent in waiting rooms before anyone saw them.
It comes after a harrowing report warned that NHS 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 patients in ‘animal’ conditions, stranded in hospital car parks, cupboards and toilets.
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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 claimed to have 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.
“Seeing that lady, scared and subjected to animal conditions, is what broke me,” she said. “At the end of that shift I resigned because I no longer had a job.”
Responding to the report, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told MPs that ‘corridor care’ was ‘undignified’, but warned that patients were likely to still suffer from it next winter.
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.