Waits in A&E at worst level since records started

Just 84pc of patients seen in four hours

A&E WAITING times in England have reached their worst level since records began after hospitals buckled under the strain of rising numbers of emergency attendances

NHS England figures show that during January, just 84.4 per cent of patients were treated or admitted in four hours, against a 95 per cent target.

It means almost 330,000 patients waited longer than they should despite lower levels of flu and norovirus than last year.

The data shows that 83,519 people endured waits of more than four hours to be admitted to hospital and more than 600 waited more than 12 hours.

The last time the 95 per cent A&E target – which was introduced in 2004 – was hit was in July 2015.

No major Yorkshire emergency departments met the A&E target last month and more than 7,600 patients in the region waited more than four hours for a bed after a decision was made to admit them.

The Nuffield Trust’s chief economist, Professor John Appleby, said: “The proportion of patients spending more than four hours in A&E has risen to 15.6 per cent in January – the highest ever in this set of data. It looks like the gap between the service’s capacley ity and the care we need from it is widening.”

He said only two A&E departments in England met the fourhour target and attendances have risen by an “astonishing 85,000” compared with January last year, at a time in the year when they would usually fall.

“Last year, there was widespread concern as we saw trol- waits balloon, yet today’s figures show an even higher level,” he said.

Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) president Dr Taj Hassan, a Leeds A&E consultant, said: “Sadly, the situation afflicting our emergency departments has become seemingly normalised with a ‘chronic crisis mode’ that does not allow staff to deliver the quality of care they would wish and patients should rightly expect.”

Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “Ministerial incompetence has left our NHS with chronic shortages of NHS staff with no clear idea of how to sort this out.”

A spokesman for the NHS said thousands more people have been successfully treated in A&E within four hours because the total number of attendances has increased year on year.

An average of 2,440 more people a day were looked after within four hours of arriving at A&E in January 2019 compared with the same month in 2018 – an increase of 4.4 per cent.

Sadly, the situation in A&E has become a ‘chronic crisis mode’. Taj Hassan, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.