The Daily Telegraph

A&E waiting times ‘eight times worse’ than NHS claims

- By Lizzie Roberts HEALTH CORRESPOND­ENT

A&E waiting times last year were almost eight times worse than official NHS figures suggest, analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has found.

Some 1,047 patients a day, on average, waited 12 hours or longer from their time of arrival at emergency department­s across England last year, according to figures released to the College under Freedom of Informatio­n laws.

However, official figures from NHS England show that around 133 patients a day, on average, waited 12 hours or more to be admitted to hospital from A&E.

These figures only measure the time patients wait from the moment they are told by a doctor they will be admitted to a bed, known as Decision to Admit (DTA), which the RCEM argued is a “gross under-representa­tion of the reality”. The RCEM instead used the Time of Arrival (TOA) metric, which is measured from the moment the patient steps foot into A&E.

Official figures fail to “capture the vast majority of patients who have no choice but to spend extended lengths of time in [emergency department­s],” the College said.

The metric also omits patients who experience­d long waits but were eventually discharged, or chose to discharge themselves, the report added.

Dr Adrian Boyle, vice-president of the RCEM, said the new figures were “staggering” and showed the “critical state” of emergency care. The RCEM

sent Freedom of Informatio­n requests to hospitals in England to find out how many patients had waited 12 hours or longer from their time of arrival at an emergency department.

Out of 118 hospital trusts contacted, 74 replied. At these trusts, 381,991 patients (4.3 per cent) experience­d a 12-hour delay from their time of arrival in the department last year – “much worse than official figures indicate”, the report warned. “Long stays and crowding usually result from full hospitals being unable to find patients a bed, so they are left on a trolley – these are typically older and frail patients,” the authors wrote.

They noted the NHS had changed the way it records data, and this year data will now be measured from the patient’s arrival in an emergency department to discharge, admission, or transfer.

According to separate NHS figures quoted in the report, in the 2020-21 financial year the number of patients waiting for 12 hours after arrival in A&E was 21 times higher than the reported figure of those waiting for 12 hours or longer after a decision was taken to admit them to a ward.

The college said the difference in figures proved the DTA metric “obscures” the scale of A&E overcrowdi­ng.

Wendy Preston, the Royal College of Nursing’s head of nursing practice, said: “There simply aren’t enough staff to provide the services needed and patient safety has never been at a greater risk.”

Rory Deighton, acute lead at the NHS Confederat­ion, said the figures revealed how “strained, under-staffed and under-pressure” emergency department­s are.

An NHS spokesman said: “NHS staff continue to go above and beyond, working closely with colleagues in social care, to ensure people leave hospital when they are fit to do so, not just because it is better for them, but because it helps free up precious NHS bed space for people who need it most.”

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