The NHS is engulfed in a summer crisis, senior doctors have said, amid severe ambulance delays, corridors crowded with trolleys and patients facing 25-hour waits in A&E units.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) sounded the alarm over the “national scandal” of long waits for emergency care that it said were leading to “entirely preventable” deaths at a time of the year when there should be some respite from the traditional pressure experienced over winter.
Elderly people in particular were facing the brunt of the impact, with many forced to endure horrific long waits for a bed once a decision had been taken to admit them to hospital, the college said.
A snapshot survey by the RCEM of emergency department chiefs from across the UK, conducted between Monday and Wednesday this week, exposed the extent of the summer crisis in hospitals.
Nine in 10 (91%) of 63 A&E bosses admitted NHS patients were “coming into harm” on their wards due to the quality of care that could be delivered under current conditions.
Eighty-seven per cent said they had patients being treated in corridors and 68% said they had patients waiting in ambulances outside their A&E.
One emergency department leader revealed that one of their patients this week waited more than 19 hours for a hospital bed to become available once a decision was made to admit them after they had already waited six hours to be seen. Overall, the patient ended up waiting 25 hours in A&E.
“It very much used to be the case that A&E clinicians would expect a spike in demand in the colder months due to the usual seasonal illnesses and there would be some slight respite and time to regroup in the summer,” the RCEM president, Dr Adrian Boyle, said. “But those days are long gone.”
Boyle told the Guardian the NHS was trapped in a “Narnian” winter “permacrisis” all year round.
The warning came a week after the latest NHS figures revealed the overall waiting list in England had risen for the first time in seven months.
An estimated 7.57m treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of April, relating to 6.33 million patients – up slightly from 7.54m treatments and 6.29 million patients at the end of March, NHS England said.
Boyle has written to the major political parties calling for action. In the letter, he described the summer crisis as “nothing short of a national scandal” as he called for specific commitments to address problems in A&Es.
The survey results showed “the level of harm and risk our patients are being exposed to, as recently as yesterday”, he added. “These responses reveal the true and shameful reality of the state of emergency care in the UK.
“Last year the deaths of more than 250 people a week were associated with long waits in emergency departments – that’s the equivalent of an aeroplane full of people every seven days.
“These deaths are entirely preventable if long waits before admission were addressed and eradicated.
“But as the political parties detail their plans and commitments ahead of the general election, we have yet to see one specific policy in any manifesto aimed at tacking this scandalous and shameful situation.
“The risk to patients’ lives is very real, it is very serious and is happening right now. People are dying, and all we have from those hoping to form the next government is a deafening silence on this issue, which really is a matter of life and death.”
The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have pledged to tackle NHS waits in their manifestos.
The shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said: “24 Hours in A&E was a TV programme; under the Tories it’s a grim reality for patients. We’ll fix the front door of the NHS by bringing back the family doctor, so patients aren’t forced to A&E because they can’t get a GP appointment.”
The Lib Dem health spokesperson, Daisy Cooper, said the government’s failure to invest in social care had “left A&Es across the country picking up the pieces”, putting “patients in danger and costing taxpayers more”. She added: “Every vote for the Liberal Democrats is a vote to fix the NHS and ensure people can access the care they need when they need it.”
