Almost 14,000 people died needlessly in England last year because of ‘very long’ A&E waits of up to 12 hours, a new study suggests.
Hospitals in the country have become ‘deadly unsafe’, unions say, due to the lack of beds and staff.
An average of 286 people probably died every week in 2023 while waiting in emergency departments, Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) found.
There was one extra death for every 72 patients that spent eight to 12 hours in an emergency ward – the risk of death increased from five hours.
‘Waiting time’ refers to how long it takes after arriving in A&E to be admitted to hospital, transferred to another healthcare provider or discharged.
The NHS once aimed to admit, transfer and discharge 95% of patients attending A&E within four hours, according to the Handbook to the NHS Constitution.
However, an analysis by the emergency physician association found the NHS falls far short of this, with just 70.9% of patients seen within that time frame.
This falls below even the lower target of 76% to be hit by March 2024 health officials set in December 2022.
NHS data shows more than 1,500,000 patients waited 12 hours or more in emergency units last year.
In February, 44,417 patients waited more than 12 hours to be admitted to A&E departments. That same month, an average of 13,373 people were admitted to hospital in an emergency via A&E each day.
These figures do not include people waiting in the back of ambulances.
RCEM president Dr Adrian Boyle said: ‘Excessively long waits continue to put patients at risk of serious harm.
‘Small improvements in four-hour access standard performance are not meaningful when there are so many people staying more than 12 hours.
‘Effort and money should go where the harm is greatest.’
Dr Boyle said a lack of capacity in A&E is one factor behind the wait, leading to people needing emergency care being stuck in corridors or ambulances.
‘The direct correlation between delays and mortality rates is clear. Patients are being subjected to avoidable harm,’ he added.
‘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 RCEM crunched the numbers of a study of 5,000,000 NHS patients published in the Emergency Medicine Journal (EMJ) in 2021 and a freedom of information audit.
The college stressed, however, that its new analysis still likely falls short of the true death toll.
In 2022, the RCEM estimated 300 to 500 excess deaths occurred in England every week that year.
An NHS spokesperson said: ‘We have seen significant increases in demand for A&E services, with attendances in February up 8.6% on last year and emergency admissions up 7.7%, and 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.
The reason for the extra deaths is due to various factors, so it's appropriate for the ONS experts to keep studying these reasons because they are in charge of the statistics authority.
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