Analysis Of A&E Waiting Times Show Struggling Hospital Trusts

The BBC has reported this week that their analysis of data for A&E waiting times in England found that at some hospitals, more than half of patients have had to wait more than four hours.

In the analysis of data for December and January, Hull University Hospitals, Wye Valley and Shrewsbury, and Telford were the worst for A&E waits. University Hospitals of Leicester had the 7^th worst results for A&E waits.

NHS England said that there had been significant demand for emergency care this winter, but improvements had started to be made, which NHS bosses would now look to build on.

National Director of Healthwatch England, Louise Ansari, has said that there had been signs of progress in recent weeks, but she felt that there was still a long way to go. She commented that the Government and NHS England needed to go further and be more ambitious to help hospitals get back to seeing 95% of patients within four hours.

The data

Comment

The data clearly indicates the struggles of hospitals still trying to cope with the impact of a difficult winter and ongoing issues with ambulances.

Clearly, the issues within A&E will continue to cause knock-on problems for ambulances waiting to handover patients. It is an incredibly vicious circle and there is a lot of work to do.

Whilst improvements have started to be made, the key now is to look to focus on pushing this forward as we come out of winter and hopefully, demand settles. Lessons will need to be learned from this year in order that plans and preparations can be made for next winter in an attempt to avoid this happening to this level again.