Reversing the urgent and emergency care spiral of decline

NHS urgent and emergency care is under intolerable strain. This strain is increasingly causing harm to patients.1 Timely and high quality patient care is often not being delivered due to overcrowding driven by workforce and capacity constraints.23 While the covid-19 pandemic has accentuated and arguably expedited the crisis; the spiral of decline in urgent and emergency care has been decades long and unless urgent action is taken, we may not yet have reached its nadir.In January 2023, 42 725 patients waited more than 12 hours in England’s emergency departments for an inpatient bed. This compares to 16 558 in January 2022 and 2,847 in January 2020. This is further illustrated in the data from March 2023 with 39 700 patients waiting more than 12 hours in emergency departments compared to 22 500 and 1,184 in the same month of 2022 and 2020 respectively. The rate of this rise is gravely…
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