Health

A&E delays killing up to 500 people a week, top expert warns

Up to 500 people could be dying each week because of delays to emergency care in the NHS, a top healthcare official has said.

Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, 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. We need to actually get a grip of this.”

The Independent revealed just before Christmas that the A&E crisis has been linked to more than 15,000 deaths in 18 months, with as many as 500 patients a week dying because of long waits for emergency care.

Internal NHS data obtained showed that the number of patients forced to wait for more than 12 hours in A&E has quadrupled since April 2019.

However, 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”.

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 be in a situation where we cannot just shrug our shoulders and say, ‘This winter was terrible, let’s do nothing until next winter’.”

He added: “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.

“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.

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.

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.

Xural.com

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