NHS England: Urgent and emergency care plan 2025/26

Summary

This report sets out how the NHS will resuscitate urgent and emergency care, with a focus on getting patients out of corridors, keeping more ambulances on the road, and enable those ready to leave hospital to do so as soon as possible.

Content

Summary of actions and impact for patients and carers

Focus as a whole system on achieving improvements that will have the biggest impact on urgent and emergency care services this winter

By the year-end, with improvement over winter, we expect to:

• Reduce ambulance wait times for Category 2 patients – such as those with a stroke, heart attack, sepsis or major trauma – by over 14% (from 35 to 30 minutes).
• Eradicate last winter’s lengthy ambulance handover delays by meeting the maximum 45-minute ambulance handover time standard, helping get 550,000 more ambulances back on the road for patients.
• Ensure a minimum of 78% of patients who attend A&E (up from the current 75%) are admitted, transferred or discharged within 4 hours, meaning over 800,000 people a year will receive more timely care.
• Reduce the number of patients waiting over 12 hours for admission or discharge from an emergency department compared to 2024/25, so this occurs less than 10% of the time. This will improve patient safety for the 1.7 million attendances a year that currently exceed this timeframe.
• Tackle the delays in patients waiting to be discharged – starting with the nearly 30,000 patients a year staying 21 days over their discharge-ready-date, saving up to half a million bed days annually.
• Increase the number of children seen within 4 hours, resulting in thousands of children every month receiving more timely care than in 2024/25.

Develop and test winter plans, making sure they achieve a significant increase in urgent care services provided outside hospital compared to last winter

• Improve vaccination rates for frontline staff towards the pre-pandemic uptake level of 2018/19. This means that in 2025/26, we aim to improve uptake by at least 5 percentage points.
• Increase the number of patients receiving urgent care in primary, community and mental health settings, including the number of people seen by Urgent Community Response teams and cared for in virtual wards.
• Meet the maximum 45-minute ambulance handover time standard.
• Improve flow through hospitals, with a particular focus on reducing patients waiting over 12 hours, and making progress on eliminating corridor care.
• Set local performance targets by pathway to improve patient discharge times, and eliminate internal discharge delays of more than 48 hours in all settings.
• Reduce length of stay for patients who need an overnight emergency admission. This is currently nearly a day longer than in 2019 (0.9 days) and needs to be reduced by at least 0.4 days .
• Reduce the number of patients who remain in an emergency department for over 24 hours while awaiting a mental health admission. This will provide faster care for thousands of people in crisis every month.

National improvement resource and additional capital investment is simplified and aligned to supporting systems where it can make the biggest difference  

Allocating over £370 million of capital investment to support:

• Around 40 new same day emergency care centres and urgent treatment centres.
• Mental health crisis assessment centres and additional mental health inpatient capacity to reduce the number of mental health patients having to seek treatment in emergency departments.
• Expansion of the Connected Care Records for ambulance services, giving paramedics access to the patient summary (including recent treatment history) from different NHS services, enabling better patient care and avoiding unnecessary admissions.