More NHS Foundation Trusts are falling behind their Waiting Times target according to this article from the Guardian, where some 32 out of 88 hospital trusts are failing to treat accident patients within four hours of arrival in A&E.
NHS Hospitals have to meet a Government set target to treat 95 % of all patients visiting A&E within a four hour window. As part of its recent report on the figures Monitor – the regulator tasked with monitoring the semi-independent NHS foundation trusts, said that these figures reflect the fact that these hospitals are really struggling to deal with an ever-increasing numbers of patients attending A&E.
In a similar survey published last December (2012) the Quality Care Commission also commented…
“…that 33% of people spent more than four hours waiting for treatment in A&E, up from 27% in 2008. It also noted a large rise in the number of patients who had to wait more than 30 minutes before seeing a nurse or doctor.”
Clearly a trend in emerging. Let’s hope that the NHS can get on top of this issue soon, but with the many changes that are about to hit the NHS over the coming months we think it will be a tough task to see an early improvement.
Raw Data
Some of the raw data that went into the creation of these reports is available as Spreadsheets (Excel) for direct download from the Department of Health website. Once you arrive at this page, you will need to scroll down to December 2012 A&E Data, it is the last file in that listing (the file name is: 2012-13 Quarter 3 : – 13 weeks to w/e 30.12.2012 (Revised 28.02.2013). Click on the filename to open or download it.
New Page and Old data
NHS Watch had been monitoring Waiting Times on its previous website for quite some time and we will begin that task again in the next few days, you can see the initial information on our main NHS Waiting Times page.
We have also discovered that much of the old data which we published has been moved to the UK’s digital National Archives, we’ll provide some links to that data as well.
NHS Watch 