Scottish A&E waiting times worst on record again

The number of people having long waits in A&E has hit the highest levels on record for the second week in a row, new figures show.

The Scottish government target is for patients to be seen and subsequently discharged or admitted to hospital within four hours.

The latest weekly figures show 8,610 were not dealt with in the target time.

A record 1,015 people waited more than 12 hours, an increase of 35% on the previous seven days.

The Scottish government has a target of dealing with 95% of patients within four hours which has not been met since July 2020.

It began publishing weekly A&E statistics in February 2015 when meeting the target dropped to 86%.

In the latest figures, for the week ending 20 March, there were 25,506 attendances at A&E in Scotland and just 66.2% were dealt with within the four-hour target.

The figures showed 2,615 patients spent more than eight hours in an A&E department and 1,015 were there for in excess of 12 hours.

The figures cover the week that the number of patients in Scottish hospitals with Covid reached the highest level seen during the pandemic.

The Scottish government's latest daily statistics revealed a record 2,383 people were in hospital on Monday with recently confirmed cases of the virus.

The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said hundreds of patients were dying unnecessarily because of delays while they waited in A&E.

In response to the latest figures, Dr John Thomson, vice president of the RCEM in Scotland, confirmed there was a full-blown crisis within Scotland's emergency departments.

He said: "Quite simply our patients are coming to unnecessary harm due to the length of time they are waiting in our emergency departments."

Dr Thomson said there were significant staffing gaps due to Covid and from burnout after dealing with the pandemic for two years.

He also said there was a lack of capacity in acute hospital wards which was leading to the backlog in trying to discharge from A&E.

Health Secretary Humza Yousaf said the unprecedented impact of the pandemic was continuing to take its toll and the A&E figures underlined the pressure on the NHS.

He said the chief nursing officer was undertaking a review of current coronavirus-related restrictions in hospitals with a view to reducing the pressure.

Mr Yousaf said that Scotland continues to have the best performing A&Es in the UK.

Scottish Tory health spokesman Dr Sandesh Gulhane said: "These worst ever A&E waiting time figures are simply atrocious. They are a damning indictment of Humza Yousaf's time as health secretary and ought to shame the SNP government."

He said that excess waits inevitably lead to needless deaths.

"It's now more than six months since Humza Yousaf's patently inadequate Covid recovery plan was published, yet we've still seen no plan B for tackling the ever-growing A&E waiting times," Dr Gulhane said.

Scottish Labour deputy leader, Jackie Baillie, said the figures exposed a "record-breaking failure in A&E".

She added: "Thousands of lives are now being risked in A&E departments on a weekly basis - this is completely unacceptable."

Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton called for an urgent inquiry into avoidable deaths caused by the crisis in emergency care.

In England, NHS stats are published monthly so A&E waiting figures for March are not available yet.

In February, the figures for all types of A&E showed 73.3% of patients were seen within four hours.

However, the figure for major type 1 emergency departments was just 60.8%.