LONG A&E waiting times contributed to some 23,000 ‘excess patient deaths’ last year, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said yesterday.
In 2022, 1.66 million people in England waited for more than 12 hours in A&E from the moment they arrived in the emergency department, said the College, warning that long waiting times can have ‘catastrophic consequences for patient safety and mortality’.
A new briefing paper by the College examined long waits and found that in 2022 1,656,206 patients in England waited 12 hours or more from arrival in an emergency department until they were admitted, transferred or discharged.
It then calculated the standardised mortality ratio linked to the long waits and concluded that there was one extra death for every 72 patients that spend eight to 12 hours in the department and therefore that 23,003 excess patient deaths in 2022 in England were associated with long stays in emergency departments.
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: ‘These data, while shocking, are unsurprising. Long waiting times are associated with serious patient harm and patient deaths – the scale shown here for 2022 is deeply distressing. The data show how necessary it is to have transparent figures.
‘We are pleased that both the Department of Health and Social Care and NHS England have heeded our calls and will be publishing the 12-hour data from time of arrival in the emergency department regularly from April this year. We look forward to seeing these data published then.
‘We believe that being honest with the data will be a service to patients and staff.
‘It will lead to a better understanding of patient flow and to both transformation and change in the emergency care system.
‘However, this transformation and change can only come if we have the staff, beds and resources we need.
‘We urge the government to publish the fully funded long-term NHS workforce plan that they pledged to deliver. This must include measures to retain existing staff who are burned out and may be considering leaving the NHS.’
