Some 23,000 “excess patient deaths” may have occurred due to long A&E wait last year, a medical college has claimed.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said that in 2022 some 1.66 million people in England waited for more than 12 hours in A&E from the moment they arrived in the emergency department.
It warned that long waiting times can have “catastrophic consequences for patient safety and mortality”.
