Urgent care worse than pre-pandemic, think tank says

A leading health think tank says urgent and emergency care in England is performing "far worse" than before the pandemic.

The Health Foundation argues that the NHS was "in distress" this winter with A&E waiting times reaching a record high.

The group says it would be wrong just to blame relatively high levels of flu.

The government is due to publish an urgent and emergency care plan soon. The Department for Health and Social Care said that hospitals were "feeling the strain" but that it was taking "decisive action" to prevent winter crises.

The Health Foundation report on the recent winter says that the number of people waiting 12 hours or more in A&E after a decision to admit to a ward was the highest since modern records began. It topped 60,000 in January, or 11% of emergency admissions.

The report says that a familiar problem remains as acute as ever – delays discharging patients from hospital who are fit to leave. This, it says, made bottlenecks worse in A&E and for ambulances trying to hand over patients and that delays for those handovers were worse than in previous winters.

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Source: BBC News, 28 April 2025