Zahlen deuten darauf hin, dass es in England monatlich mehr als 1.300 Todesfälle aufgrund langer Wartezeiten in der Notaufnahme gibt
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jun/08/more-than-1300-deaths-a-month-in-england-due-to-long-ae-waits-figures-suggest
Von drleebot
19 Kommentare
I went to A&E for panic attacks and was seen in about 4 hours. The Dr was fantastic and checked me over, gave me a blood test to rule out issues like Thyroid on top of the typical observations.
Overall 10/10 experience. Yes there’s a wait, but if you’re seriously unwell 4 hours isn’t that bad.
What I noticed however is there were too few seats, and plenty of women left their handbags on chairs beside them when people with crutches were left standing around. I ended up standing to not take a chair from anyone old / a person who might need it.
Instead of training doctors and nurses here we get imports some of who are dangerous and incompetent.
Bring back free (or at least fair and financially viable) nurse training and increase places in our med schools.
Edit: forgot to add the NHS is being run to the ground for and by privatisation. Easy to convince the masses privatisation is needed when a public body is purposfully enshitified.
Making A&E and ambulances function is the most important thing the government can do which is not national security related.
I dont know about anyone elses experiences but i went to a and e and the waiting room was packed out as i stood in line waiting to tell the nurse at the door my issues. As soon as i told her they made me go to the reception their take some info and then i was skipped pass all the lot in that outside waiting area. Yes waits time are an issue but in a and e you are treated based on how serious you are. If you are in a life or death scenario you are unlikely to be waiting and will quickly be put in resus.
People don’t like to admit it/acknowledge it but a and e is full of a lot of people just wasting time coming in with very minor things.
Yesterday in A&E, within 4 hours I had my blood drawn twice, two echos, an XRAY, and a CT scan. It all seemed to go by pretty quickly though.
Definitely felt more efficient than other times I had been to A&E.
The only thing that could save you is possibly the cause of your death.
I ended up in A&E with a very bad post-OP infection for which 111 kept advising rest and paracetamol. When eventually I begged for an ambulance to come home the paramedics found a principle of sepsis and got me to the A&E. I sat on a chair for 8 hours, with high fever which would’t go under 39, and I was (won’t go in too kuch details) but I was literally dripping liquids of all sort of colours from a place of the body which usually doesn’t, until I was given two rounds of IV antibiotics which sorted me out.
Literally, on this day, I don’t know how I dodged meningitis.
This country is doomed.
Underfunding the NHS is a political decision, that the previous, current and future government will continue to make.
There is desperate need for more bodies on the shop floor in hospitals, but there is a recruitment freeze, and the goal post on acceptable staffing levels keep getting moved.
I’d like to pull out a couple of quotes from the article:
> [The RCEM’s president, Dr Ian] Higginson said: “As an emergency doctor, it’s heartbreaking that patients arrive to our emergency departments in their time of need, and we can’t do our jobs properly because we are full. To make things worse **we are being asked to focus on the least sick patients to try and marginally improve headline statistics**, rather than on those who need our services the most.
–
> A [Department of Health and Social Care] spokesperson added: “While **A&E waiting times are at their lowest level in half a decade**, we know there is more to do. That is why we are investing over £215m in 40 new and expanded same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres across England to reduce pressure on A&E.”
The government knows long waiting times are a problem, so they’re focusing hard to reduce them in any way possible. But this „any way possible“ seems to take the form of cheating the statistics*. In this case, they do that by prioritising the quick patients over the patients with the most need, which actually hurts health outcomes overall.
Take a step back and think about what the actual goal is here: We want better health outcomes for the population. Shortening wait times is an instrumental goal along this path; it isn’t the end goal. But it’s a lot easier to measure, and it’s a lot easier to change. As the saying goes, when an measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. Many of these changes don’t help the end goal of improving health outcomes, and this is one of them. If you prioritise the quick patients, the average waiting time goes down, but the risk of the most critical patients dying while they wait for care goes up.
So the government cheats the statistics to reduce average wait times and claims victory, while what they’ve actually done is make health outcomes worse.
Wait till good old Nige gets in and it cost you £3000 for your Ambulance and £1500 just to get past reception only then for you to wait 13 hours because the American Insurance Companies that are bribing him don’t give a shit about actual health care just cash.
Long waits are mostly due to waiting for an inpatient bed. Beds on wards are blocked by patients ready to be discharged. These are elderly patients waiting for care home provision, rehab bed, requirding their home altering e.g. staircase lift or other provisions for home based care, all which require funding with lots of paperwork and working with locks authority whose resources are thin already etc…
You have approx. 10-20% not needing a bed at any given time.
This will only get worse with the elderly population growing. This needs to be addressed. Another long wait is patients with mental health issues that require psychiatric services.
Looks like no one is reading the article properly. Everyone is talking about the waits and triage – but has completely missed the point of the article.
„There were more than 300 deaths linked to long waits every week in 2025, up from 30 a week in 2015, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.“
So in ten years, the number of people dying from long waits AFTER triaging has increased TENFOLD.
Yeah that sounds like a believable statistic. Last time I went to A&E was for a neck injury, incredible pain, couldn’t walk – sat on the floor of A&E for 21 hours without being seen while people who came after were in and out in hours. My mother had a heart attack in the A&E waiting room and the receptionist and nurses gave zero fucks and wouldn’t admit her despite her having a life threatening episode right in front of them with random people trying to get her a chair and help.
She got seen after about 10 hours, I had to self discharge and still live with daily excruciating pain that the doctors don’t give a fuck about and won’t help me with.
Now I won’t go to A&E unless I’m actively bleeding out and get carted there unconscious. Fuck going through that torture and mental anguish again in a place supposed to be for getting help.
So many people go to A&E instead of their GP or the walk in centre and it takes up so much of the hospitals time and resources
Can we delve deeper and ask what are the age and condition of those dying?
I recently had the misfortune of a night in the A&E waiting room after my early morning request for a GP appointment resulted in an out of hours doctor seeing me at 8pm, and that doctor deciding better safe than sorry and sending me to A&E.
The A&E I went to had a single doctor working the night shift. It was ridiculous. For most of the night that doctor was, for good reason, focused on the folk arriving by ambulance and the couple of children who arrived in a really bad way and got rushed through the doors. Maybe one person every hour and a half was being called from the waiting room.
I completely get that most people don’t want to work a night shift. But it’s clearly as high demand a time as during the day, so the staffing should be spread over the 24 hour period rather than the day shift being prioritised.
A perfect storm of chronic underfunding, disjointed primary and secondary care pathays , combined with an increase in the over 70’s population.
It was a good job I was with my elderly mum when she was ill and in A&E, we sat for hours and I had to fight for some attention.They would have let her sit there dehydrated, needing a blood transfusion.
I wonder what number of those could have been prevented by people only going when they actually need to.
I know that people are seen by order of severity, but some people no doubt inflate their symptoms or add to the queue of people waiting to be seen.
The simple fix is to this is to charge a £10 admission deposit. If you’re determined to be ill enough for A&E you get your deposit back, otherwise it goes to funding A&E. This would immediately cut down the number of A&E timewasters, and could similarly be applied to GP surgeries to punish appointment no-shows.