NEARLY one in 20 patients in the UK are waiting in emergency departments for more than 12 hours to be admitted to hospital, data suggests.

According to figures gathered by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), in the week of December 28 to January 3, some 2,614 patients waited longer than 12 hours to be admitted to a bed at 32 NHS trusts and boards across the country.

The RCEM said this represented 4.77 per cent of all attendances that week – and was a 21.14 per cent increase from the previous week’s 2,158 patient total.

The findings are part of the latest weekly report from the RCEM’s 2020-21 Winter Flow Project that is tracking anonymised data from a group of 35 NHS sites across the UK from October 2020 to March 2021.

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The project was first launched in 2015 “to highlight the difficulties facing an NHS struggling with unprecedented financial difficulties and insufficient resources,” the RCEM said.

The RCEM said that since the beginning of October last year, 26,806 patients have waited longer than 12 hours to be admitted to a bed at its project’s sampled sites across the UK.

It also said data showed performance for the “four-hour standard” – a time target within which emergency departments should aim to admit, transfer or discharge a patient – fell to 71.87 per cent from December 28 to January 3.

The RCEM said this figure was the “worst” performance of the current winter period, and only “marginally” lower than the 72.03 per cent for the corresponding week a year earlier.

In the period of December 28 to January 3, acute bed capacity rose to 23,859 – an increase of 1.08 per cent, or 254 beds, on the previous week, the RCEM found.

Dr Katherine Henderson, RCEM president, said: “We recognise that we are in the middle of a pandemic but the number of patients waiting more than 12 hours prior to admission to a hospital ward is so worrying.

“We went into the pandemic with the NHS struggling with beds and workforce. This pandemic has further exposed the core shortages of essential staff, beds and resources.

“Our emergency doctors and other healthcare workers are working relentlessly hard. They are doing their best to keep up with the number of patients requiring admission. They are making sure that social distancing and infection prevention control measures are in place, but the demand makes this an extremely difficult challenge.

“It is a dire situation to be in. Our departments are crowded, with many places having no choice but to administer care in corridors – as shown by the number of patients waiting 12 hours or longer.

“Not only is this dangerous in of itself but it increases the risk of nosocomial infection which we cannot allow in the middle of a pandemic. It also makes it more difficult to get patients offloaded from ambulances and our great paramedic crews back out to help the next person who needs them.

Dr Henderson said hospitals’ wait times needed to be measured “properly”.

Dr Henderson added that “new metrics” would improve understanding of the problems facing emergency departments to help “take better preventative action to stop dangerous crowding and corridor care”.