Official figures are dramatically underplaying the dire delays in A&E.
According to statistics published by the NHS, almost 520,000 patients endured 12-hour waits in 2024.
But this only tracks tram waits: the time between when doctors decide a patient needs to be admitted to a ward and when they are assigned a bed.
Figures showing when patients actually arrived at A&E reveal that 1.75 million waited 12 hours to be seen last year, MailOnline can reveal.
In England’s busiest hospitals, a quarter of patients seeking urgent care are neither admitted nor discharged within that time.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (FT) was the worst offender in December, with 27.5 per cent of A&E patients enduring 12-hour waits.
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Rates also surpassed the quarterly mark at both the Countess of Chester Hospital NHS FT (26.6 per cent) and Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS FT (25 per cent).
Excluding specialist facilities, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT performed better on emergency waits of half a day or more (1.7 per cent).
The full results of MailOnline’s trust-by-trust analysis are integrated into a search tool, allowing you to see how your A&E is faring.
The little-known statistics, published by NHS England, track arrival – the moment a patient registers in the system as needing urgent care.
The clock stops when the patient has departed: when they have been admitted to a ward, transferred to a nursing home or discharged.
Headline statistics pushed by health chiefs, which ignore the reality of horrendous A&E queues, look at the time between doctors deciding a patient should be admitted and when they actually get a bed.
This discounts the hours they may have spent stuck in waiting rooms before anyone saw them.
It comes after a heartbreaking report warned that NHS staff are so overstretched that dead patients remain undiscovered for hours in A&E.
Frontline nurses said a severe shortage of beds meant sick patients were left in “animal-like” conditions, stranded in hospital car parks, closets and bathrooms.
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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 claimed they had treated up to 40 patients in a single hallway, some blocking emergency exits or parking 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.
“Seeing that lady scared and subjected to animal conditions is what broke me,” he said. “At the end of that shift, I turned in my notice with no job to go to.”
Reacting to the report, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told MPs that “hallway care” was “dignified” but warned patients were likely to still suffer from it next winter.
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.