“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.” So said Dr Ian Higginson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), after the college published new figures on what long waits in English A&E departments cost in lives.
The RCEM puts the 2025 toll at more than 300 deaths every week linked to long waits. In 2015 the weekly figure was 30. That works out to more than 1,300 patients a month, a tenfold rise in ten years.
How the college counted
The estimate rests on a study of more than 5 million NHS patients, published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021. It found one excess death for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in A&E before a bed was found. Risk began to climb after five hours and grew with each hour added.
Applying that ratio, the RCEM arrived at 15,860 excess deaths in 2025. The 2024 figure was 16,644, so last year was slightly lower. The 2015 figure was 1,657.
What doctors and nurses say
Higginson asked how many more deaths it would take before a meaningful plan appeared. “We have to ask why this awful problem isn’t the subject of relentless focus and political conversation,” he said.
He was blunt about current policy. Staff are being steered toward the least sick patients to nudge headline statistics, he said, instead of those who need emergency care most. He described the response to date as “recycled ideas that haven’t ever worked” and “quick fixes”. He welcomed the government’s stated aim of ending corridor care, but argued that patients facing long waits for admission must come first. Until then, he said, A&Es in England would stay in constant distress and people would keep dying unnecessarily.
Prof Nicola Ranger, general secretary and chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, called the death toll a catastrophe that had gone unchecked in hospitals for far too long. Her list of remedies was long: urgent investment in hospital beds and the nursing workforce, better access to primary care, more community nursing, and freeing up capacity in social care. She said each day without action had “devastating consequences” for patients.
Dr Vicky Price, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, called the deaths a source of “national shame” and said overcrowding in A&E was getting worse.
Government response
The Department of Health and Social Care said long waits for emergency care were unacceptable and that its thoughts were with families who had lost loved ones. A spokesperson pointed to what they described as the lowest A&E waiting times in half a decade, while conceding there was more to do.
The department said it is putting over £215m into 40 new and expanded same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres across England. It is also sending specialist teams to the NHS trusts with the worst corridor care.
