Excess Deaths Linked to Long A&E Waits Increased by 20 Percent, Medics Estimate

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s president said the figures were ’the equivalent of two aeroplanes crashing every week.’

Ambulances parked outside London Ambulance Service NHS Trust control room in Waterloo, London, on Jan. 23, 2023. Kirsty O'Connor/PA Wire

An estimated 16,644 excess deaths occurred as a result of long waits in A&E departments in England last year, a group of leading medics has said.

This is equivalent to 320 lives lost a week and an increase of 20 percent compared to 2023, when an estimated 13,919 patients may have died needlessly while waiting for a hospital bed, according to figures published by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) on Thursday.

The RCEM’s president, Dr. Adrian Boyle, said the figures were “the equivalent of two aeroplanes crashing every week,” calling it “heartbreaking” for families whose loved ones died waiting for care.

The medics’ methodology for making the estimate was based on a study in the Emergency Medical Journal, which found that there was one excess death for every 72 patients who spent between eight to 12 hours in the emergency ward waiting for a bed. The study found that mortality rates started to increase after five hours, and increased with longer waits.

Similarly, data published by the Office for National Statistics earlier this year found that patients who spent 12 hours in an emergency department are more than twice as likely to die within 30 days as those who were treated, admitted, or discharged within two hours.

1.7 Million Patients

In 2024, more than 1.7 million patients waited 12 hours or more to be admitted, discharged, or transferred from the emergency department, an increase of almost 14 percent on the year before, according to the RCEM.

Of those patients, more than two-thirds (69.2 percent) were waiting to be admitted to a ward for further care.

Commenting on the figures, Boyle said: “It’s sobering, heartbreaking, devastating, and more. Because this is so much more than just data and statistics. Each number represents a person—a dearly loved family member—grandparents, parents, siblings, and friends—who has died because of a system in crisis.

“These were patients who were stuck in emergency departments, watching the clock tick by as they waited extremely long hours, often on a trolley in a corridor, for an in-patient bed to become available for them.”

The medic warned there may be far more deaths linked to long delays in getting emergency care.

He pointed out that this methodology only accounts for patients who actually reached A&E. It does not include those left waiting for urgent medical care in the community, either because ambulances are unable to hand them over to overcrowded emergency departments, or because patients are “too anxious to seek help when they should.”

‘Not Sustainable’

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said the report “lays bare the crisis in NHS waiting times we inherited, with patients suffering unacceptable delays for urgent treatment. It will be a long road to fix our NHS, but we are doing the work to get us there.”

The spokesperson added that the government has invested an extra £26 billion to reform the NHS. Plans include shifting services from hospital to community to ease pressure on emergency departments, and recruiting an extra 1,000 GPs “to reach patients earlier and move towards prevention.”

File photo of a nurse taking the blood pressure of an elderly patient at an NHS hospital in England on Jan. 18, 2023. PA Wire

The estimates were released ahead of the launch of the newly-formed All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Emergency Care.

The APPG is chaired by Labour MP Dr. Rosena Allin-Khan, who is an A&E doctor and says she sees how stretched emergency services are on a weekly basis during her shifts.

She said the “ever-increasing numbers of excess deaths and long wait times in our emergency departments are simply not sustainable.”

“The government have pledged to fix the foundations of our public services and our A&Es must be at the front and centre of this ambition. There has never been an APPG for emergency care before and this is exactly the vehicle needed to bring together industry experts, legislators, and the government to move things forward,” Allin-Khan said.

Corridor Care

The estimates come amid other reports pointing to the dangers of vulnerable patients waiting long hours in A&E for treatment, with many receiving care in inappropriate settings such as in waiting rooms or hospital car parks, in what has come to be known as “corridor care.”

A report from the RCEM published earlier this month found that more than 1.1 million people aged 60 and above endured waits of more than 12 hours in A&E departments across England.

In January, the Royal College of Physicians reported that crowding in emergency departments, while growing steadily over the past several years, had worsened in the last 12 to 18 months and was no longer limited to the winter months typically linked to higher illness rates.

A poll commissioned by the Royal College of Nursing published in February showed that nearly one in five people (19 percent) had witnessed or received corridor care in NHS hospitals in the previous six months.