More than 250 needless deaths occur each week due to agonising waits in A&E, study suggests - with a million patients waiting 12 hours or more for a bed after being admitted

Soaring waits in A&E for hospital beds led to more than 250 needless deaths a week in England last year, a study suggests.

More than a million patients waited 12 hours or more for a bed after a decision had been made to admit them.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) estimates one in 72 of those patients will have died because they were left in A&E waiting rooms or on trolleys before a place on a ward became available. 

The figures – described as a conservative estimate – do not include the thousands of patients stuck in the back of ambulances who were also at risk of harm, the study says.

It comes as hospitals face a bed-blocking crisis, where patients ready to be discharged cannot leave due to a lack of social care in the community or simple bureaucratic hold-ups.

Meanwhile junior doctors have staged ten rounds of strikes over pay since March 2023, with more walkouts expected this year, and targets to eliminate the longest waits for routine care have been missed.

The NHS recovery plan set a target for March for 76 per cent of patients attending A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. 

But data shows just 70.9 per cent of patients were dealt with in that time last month. In February, 44,417 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E departments after a decision to admit them had been made.

Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the RCEM, blamed insufficient funding and lack of hospital capacity for the deaths. He said: 'Excessively long waits continue to put patients at risk of serious harm.

'Lack of hospital capacity means patients are staying in A&E longer than necessary and continue to be cared for by emergency department staff, often in clinically inappropriate areas such as corridors or ambulances.

'The direct correlation between delays and mortality rates is clear. Patients are being subjected to avoidable harm. Urgent intervention is needed to put people first.'

Royal College of Nursing general secretary Pat Cullen said 'too few staff and not enough beds' were driving long wait times. 

She added: 'Go into any hospital, the corridors and cupboards are packed with patients – care is not only undignified but fatally unsafe.' 

The RCEM used a study of more than five million people published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021 to then estimate the number of patients who died due to long waits in 2023.

It found there was one excess death for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in A&E. The risk of death started to increase after five hours and became worse with longer waiting times. 

NHS data for England shows more than 1.5million patients waited 12 hours or more in major emergency departments in 2023, with more than a million of them waiting for a bed.

The RCEM says 268 of them will have died each week due to the wait. They found a slight improvement on 2022 wait times, when the NHS was under strain during the pandemic, but this amounted to only 17 fewer weekly deaths.

Dr Boyle said: 'Small improvements in four-hour access performance are not meaningful when there are so many people staying more than 12 hours.'

Separate data from the Nuffield Trust think-tank shows the average time an A&E patient waited for a bed remained below four hours until September 2019.

It fluctuated in the pandemic before reaching a new high of seven hours and 39 minutes in December 2022. It came down to four hours and 49 minutes in July 2023, before increasing to five hours and 59 minutes in November 2023. 

The NHS is planning to introduce artificial intelligence (AI) systems that it hopes will ease the administrative burden on doctors, such as with discharge summaries.

Last night, an NHS spokesman said: 'We have seen significant increases in demand for A&E services, with attendances in February up 8.6 per cent on last year and emergency admissions up 7.7 per cent. 

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.'

The Department of Health and Social Care said: 'We are making progress in reducing A&E waiting times, including adding an extra 5,000 permanent staffed beds this winter to increase capacity and help patients be seen as quickly as possible.'

Labour's health spokesman Wes Streeting said: 'The chaos in the NHS will only get worse with another five years of the Conservatives.'