Alarm as thousands of patients in England waited over three days for treatment in A&E last year
Alarm as thousands of patients in England waited over three days for treatment in A&E last year
Jane KirbyWed, April 22, 2026 at 10:35 PM UTC
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More than 13,000 patients endured waits exceeding three days in England’s emergency departments last year, a new analysis has revealed.
Data from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found 493,751 patients spent over 24 hours in A&E before admission, transfer, or discharge last year. Of these, 13,386 waited at least three days.
The numbers spending at least a day in A&E have surged by a third since 2023, the analysis also showed.
The 2025 figure of 493,751 is up from 487,608 in 2024 and 377,986 in 2023. While 72-hour waits are down from a 2023 peak of 19,579, experts told the BMJ the overall issue of very long A&E delays is getting worse.
Mumtaz Patel, president of the Royal College of Physicians, said: “I’ve heard of patients who say they’d rather die at home than come into hospital and be waiting.”
The wait times at A&E hospitals in England sometime went over 3 days, a study has found (Getty/iStock)
James Gagg, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “When we look at 24-hour waits, this isn’t a problem related to a few trusts, this is something that’s experienced by all trusts, all of the year.”
He added that a wait of “24 hours was pretty much unheard of if you go back prior to 2020. These 24-hour waits are very much a phenomenon of the last few years”.
Referring to long waits more generally, he said: “This is where harm is occurring; this is where we know patients have worse mortality due to the delays that occur in care.”
Research has shown that patients are more likely to come to harm or die if they spend a long time in emergency departments.
An NHS spokesman said: “While the number of people waiting over four hours in A&E is at a five-year low – despite record attendances – thanks to the hard work of staff, we know there are still too many people waiting an unacceptably long time or being forced to wait in inappropriate spaces.
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“That’s why the NHS is reforming the urgent and emergency care system and supporting the trusts facing the biggest challenges, with some good early evidence of reductions in corridor care for patients.”
Figures out last week showed the number of people waiting more than 12 hours in A&E departments from a decision to admit to actually being admitted stood at 46,665 in March, down from 54,649 in February.
The figure hit a record 71,517 in January.
NHS England also said there were a record number of A&E attendances in March, driven by the meningitis outbreak in Kent.
There were 2.43 million visits last month, an increase of 16,000 on the previous record in May 2024.
Doctors said they are “ashamed” of long waits.
Dr Den Langhor, lead of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee emergency medicine, said: “This data exposes the depth of the corridor care crisis in our emergency departments.
Doctors have said they are ‘ashamed’ of the long A&E wait times (PA)
“Any doctor working in emergency care will have had shifts where they have left the hospital to go home for the night, and returning the next morning to see the same patients in waiting rooms or in corridors. And as we see here, in some cases, these patients are still waiting for a third day. This is undignified and unsafe.
“There is no excuse for hospital patients in a developed country being treated this way, and doctors are ashamed that it has come to this.”
Dr Langhor said that recent commitments by the Government to tackle corridor care “are a small step forward but mean nothing for the thousands of patients this year who have waited days for treatment”.
“Much more urgent and substantial change is needed to resolve the problem properly and quickly,” he said.
Source: “AOL Breaking”
