Senior UK Health Official Warns of ‘Unsafe, Undignified’ Care Due to A&E Delays

Ian Higginson, the vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, warned about attempts to “discredit” figures estimating that as many as 500 people are dying each week because of the delays.

Official data will not be released until later this month but the organization said it was expecting it to show December was the worst month on record for waiting times at accident and emergency departments, leading to what it described as “unsafe and undignified” care, The Guardian reported.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Monday, Higginson said the “appalling” waits could not be blamed on winter flu or Covid, as more than a dozen NHS trusts and ambulance services declared critical incidents over the festive period.

He said: “These are real figures and I worry that we’re going to hear attempts to spin and manipulate this data and discredit it. I think if we hear that, we’ve got to say no – that is spin. This is a real problem. It’s happening now in our emergency departments.

“What we’ve been hearing over the last few days is that the current problems are all due to Covid or they’re all due to flu, or that this is complex, you mustn’t jump to conclusions – all that sort of stuff.

“If you’re at the frontline, you know that this is a longstanding problem. This isn’t a short-term thing. The sort of things we’re seeing happen every winter, and it still seems to come as a surprise to the NHS. It gets worse every winter.”

Higginson said there was “really good evidence that has been accumulated over decades that long waits in emergency departments are associated with poor outcomes for patients”.

He also cited peer-reviewed research showing for every 82 patients that are delayed by more than six hours, there is one associated death.

In November, 37,837 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E to be admitted to a hospital department, according to figures from NHS England.

This is an increase of almost 355% compared with the previous November, when an estimated 10,646 patients waited longer than 12 hours.

Last week, one in five ambulance patients in England waited more than an hour to be handed over to A&E teams. In Swindon, a patient was forced to wait on a trolley in A&E for 99 hours after arriving by ambulance at Great Western hospital while staff tried to find a bed.

Higginson, who works as an emergency physician, said it was “heartbreaking” to have to deal with delays on the ground.

He said: “To see the look on my nursing staff’s faces when they are looking at another shift where there’s very few of them compared with the number of patients, to see the look on the young doctors’ faces when we ask them to go and treat patients in the back of the ambulance and to see the look on the patients’ faces when I go into the waiting room and apologize for the failures of the NHS, that they’re going to wait all night to be seen and days for a bed to be admitted to hospital – those are the things that are absolutely heartbreaking for me as a clinician.”