Britain’s emergency care is breaking down at a scale the health service’s own figures now struggle to hide. NHS England data published on Thursday show that 57,840 patients waited 12 hours or more on a trolley in October, from the decision to admit them to getting a bed. In October 2019 the figure was 725. Attendances rose about 15 per cent over the same period; trolley waits rose almost 80-fold.
Professor Frankie Swords, NHS England’s national medical director, said “the number of patients being seen within four hours in A&E is high.” The rate was 74.0 per cent. The 95 per cent standard was last met in July 2015, and none of England’s 120 major A&E trusts met it in October.
The cost is counted in lives. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that long A&E waits were associated with 15,860 excess deaths in England in 2025, about 305 a week, against 1,657 in 2015. The college calls its estimate conservative. “The number of deaths linked to long stays in our Emergency Departments explicitly show the system is failing the patients it is meant to be caring for. It’s shocking,” said Dr Ian Higginson, the college’s president.
Patients who do get through the doors increasingly wait in corridors. A daily average of 3,558 patients received corridor care in October, the highest since official counting began in May. The figures are provisional, and a patient is counted only after 45 minutes in an unsuitable space. Higginson has called corridor care “dangerous, undignified, and a source of national shame.” The government’s target is to end it by the end of this Parliament.
Ambulances are slower still. The average response to a Category 2 call was 32 minutes 45 seconds in October, against an 18-minute standard. That missed last year’s 30-minute interim target and this year’s 25-minute one. Crews handled a record 869,421 incidents.
Beyond the front door, the waiting list for planned treatment stood at 7.38 million pathways in September, against 4.57 million in February 2020 and 2.53 million in April 2010. Of those still waiting, 65.8 per cent had waited no longer than 18 weeks, against a 92 per cent standard. Just 70.7 per cent of cancer patients began treatment within 62 days of an urgent suspected-cancer, screening or consultant-upgrade referral, against an 85 per cent standard and a 75 per cent interim target that was due by March. In general practice, a quarter of non-urgent appointments came more than two weeks after booking.
Official estimates still put healthcare productivity in 2025 some 5.3 per cent below 2019, even after growth of 0.7 per cent in the year to June.
NHS England’s release led on elective care, which it called a five-year high. Health Secretary Yvette Cooper called this autumn “the busiest ever.” The 78 per cent four-hour target set for March was missed, as was the goal of fewer than 1 per cent of patients waiting more than a year.
This website has reported that emergency delays in Britain’s health service kill 300 patients a week.
