A&E departments are in “complete crisis” as up to 500 people could be dying each week because of delays to emergency care, a top official has said.
It comes after The Independent revealed before Christmas that the crisis in A&E departments had been linked to more than 15,000 deaths in the last 18 months.
In a fresh warning, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), Dr Adrian Boyle, said some A&E departments were in a “complete state of crisis”.
Dr Boyle said waiting times for December will be the worst he has ever seen – with more than a dozen NHS Trusts and ambulance services declaring critical incidents over the festive period.
“We don’t know about the waiting time figures because they don’t come out for a couple of weeks. I’d be amazed if they’re not the worst ever that we’ve seen over this December,” he told Times Radio.
“What we’re seeing now in terms of these long waits is being associated with increased mortality, and we think somewhere between 300 to 500 people are dying as a consequence of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care each week.”
His comments come after an investigation by The Independent revealed that as many as 500 patients a week are dying because of long waits for emergency care. Internal NHS data obtained showed that the number of patients forced to wait over 12 hours in A&E has quadrupled since April 2019.
NHS England chief Chris Hopson cautioned about “jumping to conclusions about excess mortality rates and their cause without a really full and detailed look at the evidence”.
But the deaths of an estimated 500 people each week caused by delays in emergency care is “not a short-term thing”, a senior health official at the RCEM said on Monday.
Ian Higginson, vice-president of the organisation, hit out at any attempt to “discredit” previous warnings from his organisation over serious problems in hospitals – saying some patients are waiting up to four days to be admitted.
“We’re hearing of patients who are in our emergency departments waiting to be admitted now for up to four days. It used to be four hours. So that is appalling,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Patients waiting more than 12 hours in A&E have surged in recent years
A severe flu outbreak and rising Covid cases are said to be adding pressure to the system and overwhelming hospitals with patients.
In November, 37,837 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E for a decision to be admitted to a hospital department, according to figures from NHS England.
This is an increase of almost 355 per cent compared with the previous November, when an estimated 10,646 patients waited longer than 12 hours.
Dr Boyle said: “If you look at the graphs, they all are going the wrong way, and I think there needs to be a real reset. We need to increase our capacity within our hospitals … We cannot continue like this – it is unsafe and it is undignified.”
Some critically-ill patients have reportedly waited hours for a bed, and ambulances have been unable to pick up those in need because they have been stuck waiting to hand over patients to hospital.
Last week, one in five ambulance patients in England waited more than an hour to be handed over to A&E teams. NHS trusts have a target of 95 per cent of all ambulance handovers to be completed within 30 minutes, and 100 per cent within 60 minutes.
Ambulance workers on the picket line outside Waterloo ambulance during a walkout in December
“The system is hardly coping right now,” said NHS Confederation chief Matthew Taylor told Sky News on Monday – saying four days of strike action would put unbearable pressure on the health service this January.
“This is an extraordinary time. I speak to NHS leaders just about every day, and a lot of them, if not most of them say, ‘This is the toughest winter we’ve dealt with’. We cannot go on like this,” he added.
Ambulance staff are set to strike again on 11 and 23 January, while nurses will walk out on 18 and 19 January. Junior doctors are to be balloted for industrial action from 9 January, the British Medical Association has said.
It comes as a survey by Savanta ComRes for the Liberal Democrats found that one in six (16 per cent) of those who could not get an appointment either administered treatment themselves or asked somebody else who was not medically qualified to do so.
No 10 has said Rishi Sunak will launch an urgent care recovery plan in a bid to get on top of long waiting times for ambulances, but there is no timetable as yet.
Education minister Robert Halfon told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday that the pressure on A&E departments is a “top priority” for the PM. “The government is putting a lot of funding and doing everything possible.”
The government said it was putting an additional £14.1bn into health and social care in the next two years, and an extra £500m into speeding up hospital discharges.
Dr Boyle also said it is “absolutely never too late” to get a flu vaccination and encouraged those who are eligible to get one in order to reduce pressure on hospitals.
He said there is likely to be a larger outbreak this year because immunity has dropped after isolation measures introduced to fight the Covid pandemic.
He added: “So the whole thing of infectious disease outbreak is extremely disruptive. We haven’t had an outbreak for the last two years because of all the things we have done around Covid and this year is shaping up to be a pretty awful flu season.”
