Long A&E waits lead to 250 needless deaths a week

MORE than 250 NHS patients a week are thought to have died needlessly because of lengthy waits in A&E, a study suggests.

Calculations by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) suggest that many critical patients are being left waiting far too long for a hospital bed, despite government pledges to improve performance.

Freedom of information requests submitted by the RCEM found that 65 per cent of people left in A&E for 12 hours or more were waiting for a bed, equating to more than one million patients over a year.

Previous research has calculated that there is one excess death for every 72 patients that spent eight to 12 hours in an A&E department.

The RCEM said it suggested an average of 268 extra deaths had occurred each week in 2023 on average because of the delays, totalling nearly 14,000 excess deaths. About 5,000 people die in hospitals in England each week.

The estimate is only 17 fewer than in 2022 when Covid restrictions were still in place early in the year, and the Government pledged to raise NHS activity levels to 130 per cent. Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the RCEM, said: “Excessively long waits continue to put patients at risk of serious harm.

“Lack of hospital capacity means that patients are staying longer than necessary and continue to be 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 being subjected to avoidable harm.

“Urgent intervention is needed to put people first. Patients and staff should not bear the consequences of insufficient funding and under-resourcing. We cannot continue to face inequalities in care, avoidable delays and death.”

The college said the excess death figures may be higher because they had not calculated the numbers who had been delayed in the back of ambulances.

The NHS has been struggling to recover from the pandemic with waiting lists for treatment hitting record highs of 7.7 million last November.

Figures released by the Liberal Democrats last month showed that almost 20,000 older people in England waited more than four hours for an ambulance to arrive after suffering a fall last year, more than double the number before the pandemic.

In January, 177,805 patients faced waits of 12 hours or more to be seen in emergency departments, an average of 5,735 a day, equating to 12.4 per cent of all patients.

Charities have warned that late diagnosis for conditions such as cancer and heart problems during the pandemic has left many people attending A&E in a critical condition and needing urgent help.

Under the NHS Recovery Plan the number of people waiting longer

than four hours in A&E before being admitted, discharged or transferred should have fallen to 24 per cent by last month. But figures show nearly 30 per cent of patients are waiting four hours or longer.

Figures released by the Liberal Democrats in January found that the number of patients waiting 12 hours or more for an emergency admission in 2023 was more than 50 times higher than seen before the pandemic.

In 2019, 8,272 people faced such a delay, despite there being 6.5 million emergency admissions, more than the 6.3 million there were last year.

Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dem health spokesman, said: “These devastating figures show just how badly this Conservative Government has neglected our NHS and brought it to its knees.

“Patients facing potentially life-changing accidents or illnesses need to be treated quickly, but it’s clear that the Conservatives’ failure to look after our health service is leading to awful consequences.”

In 2022, the RCEM said it believed 300 to 500 excess deaths were likely to have occurred in England each week, but it has since carried out this Freedom of Information audit of NHS trusts to refine the figure.

A spokesman for the NHS said emergency departments had seen significant increases in recent months, with February recording an 8.6 per cent rise in attendances compared with last year and a 7.7 increase in admissions. They said: “The latest published data shows our urgent and emergency care recovery plan – backed by extra funding with more beds, capacity and greater use of measures like same day emergency care – is delivering improvements, alongside continued work with our colleagues in community and social care to discharge patients when they are medically fit to go home, freeing up beds for other patients.”