Deaths associated with long emergency department waits before admission in England last year jump 20%.
The crisis caused by long waits in Britain’s emergency departments continues.
Analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) shows that there were more than 16,600 deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England last year. That’s an increase of 20% (2,725) compared to 2023.
Last year, more than 1.7 million patients waited 12 hours or more to be admitted, discharged or transferred from A&E. That’s almost 14% more compared to 2023.
Of these patients, 69.2% were waiting to be admitted to a ward for further care.
Using the Standard Mortality Ratio – a method which calculates that there will be one additional death for every 72 patients that experience an 8-12-hour wait before their admission – RCEM estimates that there were 16,644 associated excess deaths related to stays of 12 hours or longer before being admitted.
“I am at a loss as to how to describe the scale of this figure adequately. To give it some context, it is the equivalent of two aeroplanes crashing every week,” said Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
Sobering reading
The news shines a spotlight on the problems of long waits in Britain’s emergency departments again.
In February, Healthcare Today highlighted the jump in patients waiting more than 12 hours in Scottish A&E departments from 784 to 76,000 in only 13 years.
Earlier this month, we found that the average time that a person in a mental health crisis spent in A&E last year was an hour more than in 2023. That was based on data from 146 emergency departments across the UK which captured the experiences of almost 20,000 patients who needed urgent care due to self-harm.
Earlier this week, we reported that more than one million older people faced waits of 12 hours or more in A&Es in England last year and the older a person is, the more likely they are to experience a long stay which has a significant impact on patient safety.
And the issue of corridor care is a repeated theme. Most recently, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the British Medical Association (BMA) in Wales joined forces to address the state of corridor care in Welsh hospitals and healthcare services.
The newly formed All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Emergency Care brings together parliamentarians who will engage with healthcare professionals and organisations outside government to advocate for improvements in Urgent and Emergency Care.
Launched last week, it is chaired by Rosena Allin-Khan, herself an emergency medicine doctor and member of Parliament for Tooting.
“These statistics make for sobering reading. Ever-increasing numbers of excess deaths and long wait times in our emergency departments are simply not sustainable. As an emergency doctor, I know exactly how stretched our A&Es across the country are, as I see it on a weekly basis on my shifts,” she said.
