Shockingly, one in three patients seeking urgent care at some UK hospitals can wait at least 12 hours for care. vital treatment, as revealed by a MailOnline analysis.
The worst offender is Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where just under a third of urgent care patients at its hospitals waited 12 hours or more last month.
Countess of Chester Hospital NHS Foundation Trust came in second with 26.6 per cent of patients facing extreme delays, followed by Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, where the figure rises to 25 per cent.
The best performing trust was Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, where only 0.4 per cent of patients wait more than 12 hours to see a healthcare professional.
This was followed by Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in London (1.7 per cent of patients) and Southampton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, where the proportion is 2.1 per cent.
MailOnline carried out an in-depth analysis of the latest data on NHS A&E waiting times and found that the real number of patients facing excruciating delays could be three times higher than the health service’s estimate.
According to a recently published NHS report, almost 520,000 patients experienced delays of more than 12 hours throughout 2024.
But our research found that this figure drastically underestimated the shocking reality of the casualty crisis, with the true estimate likely closer to 1.75 million.
This is because NHS analytics only measure so-called “trolley waits” – the time between when a doctor decides a patient needs to be admitted to hospital and when they are allocated a bed.
MailOnline can now reveal how long patients can wait from the moment they arrive at A&E to the moment healthcare professionals decide the best course of treatment.
Our unique tool uses this data to allow you to see the proportion of patients waiting at least 12 hours at their local A&E.
Our analysis follows a harrowing report from NHS nurses who warned that staff are so overstretched that dead patients remain undiscovered for hours in A&E.
Frontline nurses said a severe shortage of beds meant sick Britons were left in “animal-like” conditions, stranded in hospital car parks, cupboards and bathrooms.
The report, which was based on a survey of NHS nursing staff, found that 67 per cent provide daily care in overcrowded or inadequate settings.
About 91 percent said care had not been safe.
Some said they had treated up to 40 patients in a single hallway, some blocking emergency exits or parked next to vending machines.
One nurse specifically recalled how she ‘broke’ when she saw the lack of care a 90-year-old woman with dementia was subjected to.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which describes its A&E at Blackpool Victoria Hospital as “one of the busiest in the country”, had the highest proportion of patients experiencing 12-hour waits in the country.
‘Seeing that lady, scared and subjected to animal conditions is what broke me. At the end of that shift, I handed in my redundancy with no job to go to,’ he said.
Reacting to the report, Health Secretary Wes Streeting yesterday told MPs that so-called “corridor care”, where patients cannot be provided with a bed, was “undignified”, but warned it was likely to patients will still suffer from it next winter.
Long waits for care are not only inhumane, but can also cost lives.
A previous analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine suggested that 12-hour waits caused more than 250 unnecessary deaths per week in 2023.
While our analysis covers until the end of December last year, other data suggests that the first few weeks of 2025 were no better for the NHS.
Figures published today suggest the health service is almost full, running at 96 per cent of its bed capacity last week as hospitals collapse under the weight of a winter virus “quadremic”.
According to experts, a capacity of 92 percent is the point at which the performance of staff caring for patients falls.
A combination of flu, norovirus, RSV and Covid cases requiring hospital care are believed to be driving the crisis.
Figures show almost 5,000 beds were occupied by flu patients each day last week, 3.5 times more than the same week last year.
Rates of norovirus, the winter vomiting bug, which had been declining in recent weeks, have risen again, nearly 50 percent higher than expected for this time of year.
The NHS’s clinical director of emergency care warned that hospitals were “packed” and staff were facing their busiest week yet this winter.