Shocking delays at English A&E departments are endangering lives
Making them wait and wait: This was a corridor in an English hospital’s Accident & Emergency department in early 2017 – and now the situation is worse.
You know how Tory prime ministers from David Cameron onwards have loved to tell us their increasingly-privatised English health system is so much better than those in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland?
(But most particularly Wales?)
Well, it turns out NHS England hasn’t been that good after all – and is worsening at an alarming rate.
Here’s The Guardian:
A record 420,000 patients had to wait more than 12 hours in A&E last year, analysis has shown.
The latest NHS England figures revealed a 20% increase on 2022 in people facing lengthy delays after a decision to admit them to hospital from the emergency department.
In 2023, 419,560 people – or one in 15 A&E patients – faced “trolley waits” of 12 hours or more, according to the Liberal Democrats, who compiled the analysis. It marks by far the highest number since records began in 2011, and amounts to an average of 1,150 patients a day.
The party also pointed to a postcode lottery, with almost half of patients of some trusts, such as the North Middlesex university hospital trust, waiting more than half a day.
Significant waits in A&E have been linked to excess deaths and increased harm to patients, as their condition could deteriorate before they are admitted or given a bed on a ward.
The Department of Health and Social Care has claimed it is already cutting A&E waits and ambulance response times – but if its figures are as disappointing as its claimed increase in hospital beds, then the improvement will be nowhere near enough.
A spokesperson told the Graun that the DHSE was “on track” to deliver an extra 5,000 permanently-staffed hospital beds this winter. But since the Tories took over NHS England in 2010, they have taken out of active service 17,767 beds.
That’s the problem, right there. If there aren’t enough permanent staff to bring the full, nearly 18,000, beds back on line, that’s because the Tories have been discouraging people from training with exorbitant fees, or discouraging them from staying with contemptuous pay offers.
And what about this, from the same newspaper, a couple of months ago?
NHS bosses are using misleading figures to hide dangerously poor performance by A&E units in England against the four-hour treatment target, emergency department doctors claim.
Some A&Es treat and admit, transfer or discharge as few as one in three patients within four hours, although the NHS constitution says they should deal with 95% of arrivals within that timeframe.
How well or poorly A&Es are doing in meeting the 95% target is not in the public domain because the data that NHS England publishes is for NHS trusts overall, not individual hospitals.
That means official figures are an aggregate of performance at sometimes two A&Es run by the same trust or include data for any walk-in centres, minor injuries units or urgent treatment centres that a trust also operates. Forty-eight trusts have two A&Es and many also run at least one of the latter.
So the DHSE has been lying to us about the performance of individual A&E units in England.
And then successive prime ministers have spouted DHSE figures at us during PMQs every Wednesday.
Is it too much to ask for a breakdown of performance at every individual A&E unit in England – to ascertain the genuine facts about them? In an election year, I fear it may be.
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