More than half a million people spent over 24 hours in a British emergency department last year. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) says the waiting itself cost lives: its analysis of official government data estimates 15,860 avoidable deaths during 2025, or more than 300 every week.
That works out to over 1,300 a month in Accident and Emergency (A&E) departments. The college says the 2025 total is ten times the figure from a decade earlier.
The RCEM found that the risk of avoidable death begins to climb once a patient has been kept waiting five hours, and keeps climbing with each additional hour. The volume of long waits was large. A total of 1.74 million patients in Britain’s emergency rooms waited at least 12 hours last year, and 489,000 of them waited more than 24 hours.
The four-hour standard
Under the official standard for the National Health Service, functionally all patients should be seen within four hours of arriving at A&E. The last time that happened nationwide was 2015.
According to The Times of London, the main cause is not the emergency department itself. Other hospital departments are so full that they cannot take more admissions. Patients who should move on to a ward stay put, and the emergency room turns into a very large waiting room for seriously ill people, with many placed on beds in corridors.
What emergency doctors say
Dr Ian Higginson, president of the Royal College, asked “how many more deaths it will take before we see a determined, meaningful plan to tackle this crisis.”
“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,” he said. “To make things worse we are being asked to focus on the least sick patients to try to marginally improve headline statistics, rather than on those who need our services the most.”
