Almost 19,000 NHS patients were left waiting in A&E for three days over a 12-month period, an investigation has revealed.
Between April 2023 and March 2024, nearly 400,000 people were left waiting more than 24 hours across A&E departments, a 5% rise on the previous year. Channel 4’s Dispatches programme also found that 54,000 people had to wait more than two days, a freedom of information request to NHS England found.
The investigation exposed “suffering and indignity faced by patients on a daily basis”, after an undercover reporter secretly filmed himself working as a trainee healthcare assistant inside the emergency department of the Royal Shrewsbury hospital for two months.
The “harrowing” scenes from the hospital’s A&E department came as an analyst from a thinktank said people were dying in emergency care in England “who don’t need to be dying”.
Footage shows one patient waiting for 30 hours in a “fit to sit” area while a suspected stroke sufferer was there for 24 hours, the broadcaster said.
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “I don’t think this is unique to this hospital by any stretch of the imagination. The things we’ve seen here today are clearly not just confined to winter. It was a year-round crisis in emergency care.
“Spending two days in an emergency department is worse than spending two days in an airport lounge. These are people who are sitting in uncomfortable seats where the lights never go off. There’s constant noise, there’s constant stress. There’s no end in sight.”
Clips from the investigation showed an elderly man forced to urinate in a trolley on the corridor in full view of staff and other patients while in another, a woman is left crying in agony for hours, Channel 4 said.
A total of 18,638 people waited more than three days in A&E over the period, a 60% increase on the previous 12 months. A spokesperson for the hospital trust said: “As with other hospitals, our trust is facing significant challenges with urgent and emergency care.
“We understand our challenges and are investing in our services and making steady improvements as a trust, as noted in our recent CQC report. However, there is still much more to do; we do not want to be in a position where we are caring for patients in corridors.
“We are very sorry that our patients have experienced anything less than the quality care we strive for and we are determined, working with partners, to improve the care and experience for everyone.”
The spokesperson added that although the trust disputed some of the claims made in the Dispatches programme, it would “fully investigate all of the claims to identify and embed any learning into our continuous improvement work”.
The latest figures show that more than one in four people waited longer than the target of four hours in A&E, according to the King’s Fund. Patients are waiting 33 minutes on average for an ambulance in emergency cases such as strokes and heart attacks, when the target is 18 minutes, the thinktank added.
Undercover A&E: NHS in Crisis – Dispatches - is due to air on Channel 4 at 9pm on Monday.
