250 patients a week may be dying needlessly due to hours-long wait for bed in overstretched wards

'They are left frightened and alone, feeling abandoned on NHS trolleys'

- Giles Sheldrick

LENGTHY waits in A&E could be responsible for more than 250 needless deaths each week, it is claimed.

The grim reality of an NHS struggling to cope has been laid bare by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.

It suggests patients are in grave danger, even after a decision to admit them, because there is no room.

College president Dr Adrian Boyle said: "Excessively long waits continue to put patients at risk of serious harm.

"The direct correlation between delays and mortality rates is clear.

Patients are being subjected to avoidable harm." It comes as public satisfaction with the NHS plunged to its lowest level, according to damning findings in the British Social Attitudes survey.

Struggle

One consultant physician told the Daily Express the NHS was drowning in its struggle to help the "very sick and the very stuck" as patients languished, waiting to be seen, admitted, treated, and discharged. Some emergency departments are clogged up. With no spare capacity on wards, patients are treated in corridors.

The NHS says 76% of patients attending A&E should be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. Yet data for March showed just 70.9% were seen within that time.

A month earlier, the number waiting more than 12 hours in overcrowded A&E departments from a decision to admit to being given a bed stood at 44,417.

The estimates for last year are likely to be conservative, according to the college. It used a study of more than five million patients - published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021 - as the basis of its calculations.