UK hospital A&E waiting times hit worst level on record
UK hospital A&E waiting times hit worst level on record
NHS England figures show just 83.1% of patients were treated within the four-hour target in week before Christmas. – reported The Guardian.
Hospital A&E units recorded their worst ever performance in the week before Christmas as NHS emergency care services struggled to deal with an unprecedented number of patients, figures show.
“Type 1” A&Es, emergency departments based at hospitals in England, treated and either admitted or discharged just 83.1% of arrivals within the politically important four-hour target in the week ending Sunday, 21 December.
The NHS also recorded its worst ever A&E performance using the preferred measure of NHS England and the Department of Health: this includes patients receiving urgent and emergency care in settings such as walk-in and urgent care centres, which are based at GP surgeries, on high streets or at some hospitals.
In the week before Christmas, just 88.8% of those arriving at all those places were dealt with within four hours, though that rose to 90.5% the following week. The 88.8% performance is the worst yet against the four-hour target, and was a drop on the 89.6% seen a week before, which was itself a record low.
The British Medical Association (BMA), which represents doctors, said the NHS was “struggling to cope with the sheer number of patients coming through the door”.
The NHS constitution states that 95% of all A&E patients should be dealt with within four hours. David Cameron and other ministers have regularly pledged to meet that and other key NHS targets, but performances gradually worsened during 2014.
The 83.1% record is the lowest weekly performance against the target since A&E records began in 2004. It came in the week that a record number of people – 289,530 – attended A&E.
Type 1 performance recovered slightly in the Christmas week, reaching 85.7% in the week to 28 December, partly because fewer patients attended – 262,879.
Before December, the performance of hospital-based A&E units had only fallen below 90% once during 2014. Statistics released by NHS England on Tuesday show that in the four weeks in December it dropped to 87.7% (week ending 7 December), 84.7% (14 December), then 83.1% and 85.7% in the last two full weeks of the year.
The new evidence of a growing crisis in A&E comes as more hospitals are having to declare a “major incident” as they fail to cope with what doctors and managers have said are unprecedented numbers of patients. Hospitals regularly have to increase their bed capacity by opening overflow or “contingency” wards where they can admit and treat extra patients and hiring extra staff to provide care there.
A year-on-year comparison of the last two weeks in December shows that the number of patients forced to wait more than four hours to be treated was almost treble what it was in the same fortnight in 2013. Similarly, the number who had to endure a “trolley wait” of between four and 12 hours before being admitted to a bed almost quadrupled.
While 227,400 patients had to wait more than four hours in the last three months of 2013, many more did so in the final quarter of 2014 – 407,844.
Trolley waits rose across the most recent quarter, from 39,849 in October to 90,338 in December. This sharp rise prompted the NHS England medical director, Prof Bruce Keogh, to write to all hospitals before Christmas, urging them to improve their performance and warning of the risks to patients left waiting for too long on trolleys.
Read more to see the greater pciture by simply clicking here: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jan/06/hospital-a-and-e-waiting-times-worst-record-nhs-england
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