Rise in number of patients waiting more than four hours at A&E

The proportion of patients seen in Accident and Emergency departments within the four-hour target has fallen to the lowest level since 2019, the latest NHS Scotland figures show.

Almost a fifth (19.9 per cent) of the 25,418 patients who attended A&E in the week ending July 11 waited more than four hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged.

There were 712 patients who waited longer than eight hours, and a further 167 faced a wait of more than 12 hours.

The Scottish Government’s target is for 95 per cent of patients to wait no longer than four hours, although this has not been met since July 2020.

The latest weekly figure of 80.1 per cent compliance with the target is the lowest level recorded since December 2019.

Across Scotland, NHS Forth Valley is the worst-performing health board, with just 65.1 per cent of 1,200 patients seen within four hours, followed by NHS Lanarkshire (68.5 per cent) and then NHS Fife (79.4 per cent).

The island health boards of Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles were the only ones to exceed the 95 per cent target, achieving 98.3 per cent, 96.6 per cent and 95.3 per cent respectively.

The latest figures also show the total number of A&E attendances have been falling since reaching a pandemic peak of 28,492 during the first week of June.

Nicola Sturgeon said: “The NHS is in a process of recovering from the Covid impact and that means getting non-covid treatment back to normal, catching up in the backlog.”