Summary
The idea of Emergency care services experiencing seasonal spikes in demand – so called ‘Winter Pressures’ are fast becoming a thing of the past. Instead, long waits have become the new norm year-round, and staff are caring for patients in unsafe conditions on a daily basis. It is well established that long waits are associated with patient harm and excess deaths. Last year the UK Government published a Delivery Plan for the Recovery of Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) services. A year on, far too many patients are still coming to avoidable harm.
New analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) reveals that there were almost 300 deaths a week associated with long A&E waits in 2023.
Content
The RCEM has analysed progress against the Delivery Plan for the Recovery of Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) and assessed what improvements have been made to recover emergency care services.
This work reveals that in 2023, more than 1.5 million patients waited 12 hours or more, 65% of those were patients awaiting admission.
Using a method called the Standard Mortality Ratio – which calculates there will be one additional death for every 72 patients that experience an 8–12-hour wait prior to their admission – RCEM estimates that there were almost 14,000 associated excess deaths related to waits of 12 hours or longer in 2023 – more than 268 a week.
Scrutinising the other elements of the Delivery Plan the College also found that:
- Hospital Bed occupancy remains high, consistently averaging over 94%. More than an additional 11,000 available beds are required to achieve safe occupancy levels of 85%.
- The number of patients admitted into hospital has risen by 10% one year on.
- Recent figures show that a daily average of 13,690 patients remain in hospital after a decision to discharge them has been made, only 275 fewer than in January 2023.
- The percentage of answered calls to 111 that had clinical involvement has fallen from 43.6% in January 2023 to 40% in February 2024.
- In February 2024, only 56.5% of patients met the four-hour target, a fall of 1.5 percentage points compared to when the plan was announced.
The college’s research has been published in two of its ‘RCEM Explains’ briefing documents – Progress Against Delivery Plan – one year and Insights: Long Waits and Excess deaths.
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