About 500 deaths occur weekly due to A&E delays

As reported by The Guardian, 23,000 deaths were recorded last year due to waits that lasted more than 12 hours in the emergency department

Figures from the NHS have shown that one individual dies every 23 minutes due to delays in the A&E units.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), has reported that over 23,000 deaths have been recorded in 2022 due to 12-hour minimum waits in the emergency departments. The college has said that the results were not completely unexpected due to staff and space shortages.

While the RCEM has claimed last September that over 500 deaths were being recorded weekly, the NHS has strongly denied the figures.

“The cause of excess deaths is down to a number of different factors and so attributing deaths to one exact thing, as the figures quoted by the RCEM attempt to do, is very unlikely to give a full or certain picture”, says a spokesperson from the NHS.

The RCEM have obtained their figures using the data from NHS England which shows that 1,656,206 patients spent a minimum of 12 hours in the emergency department after arrival in 2022. They then analysed these numbers against previous evidence supplied by A&E doctors published in a medical journal using the standard morality ratio measure. The final analysis led them to conclude that one more individual died for every 72 that spent over eight hours in the emergency department.

“Long waiting times are associated with serious patient harm and patient deaths,” says Dr Adrian Boyle, the RCEM president.

The NHS however claimed that only 347,703 patients waited more than 12 hours before treatment was done.

The Financial Times and Full Fact, a fact-checking charity, have conducted research on the matter and their figures show that about 500 weekly deaths are the result of A&E delays – numbers that match those of the RCEM.

Boyle called out NHS England for providing numbers that reflect patients spending over 12 hours in the A&E after being admitted, for they do not fully showcase the extent and severity of the waiting times.

NHS England have stated that they will now publish numbers revolving around 12-hour waits from April 2022 after being pressurised by the House of Lords and Office for Statistics Regulation.