Dire A&E delays are being drastically underplayed by official figures.
Under headline statistics pumped out by the NHS, almost 520,000 patients endured 12-hour waits in 2024.
But this only tracks trolley waits – the time between medics deciding a patient needs to be admitted to a ward and when they are given a bed.
Numbers exposing when patients actually arrived in A&E reveal 1.75million waited 12 hours to be seen last year, MailOnline can reveal.
At England’s busiest hospitals, a quarter of patients seeking urgent care aren’t either admitted or discharged within that timespan.
Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (FT) was the worst offender for December, with 27.5 per cent of A&E patients enduring 12-hour waits.
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Rates also exceeded the quarter mark at both Countess of Chester Hospital NHS FT (26.6 per cent) and Wirral University Teaching Hospital NHS FT (25 per cent).
Excluding specialist facilities, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS FT fared best for casualty waits of half a day or longer (1.7 per cent).
Full results of MailOnline’s trust-by-trust analysis are embedded into a search tool – allowing you to see how your A&E fares.
The little-known statistics, published by NHS England, track arrival – the moment a patient is registered on the system as needing A&E care.
The clock stops when that patient has departed – when they’ve been admitted to a ward, transferred to a care home, or discharged.
Headline statistics pushed by health chiefs, which gloss over the reality of dire A&E queues, look at the time between medics deciding the patient should be admitted to when they actually get a bed.
This discounts the hours they may have spent stuck in waiting rooms before anyone had seen them.
It comes after a harrowing report warned NHS staff are so overstretched that dead patients are lying undiscovered for hours in A&E.
Frontline nurses said a severe shortage of beds meant sick patients are left in ‘animal-like’ conditions, stranded in hospital car parks, cupboards and toilets.
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The report, which was based on a survey of NHS nursing staff, found 67 per cent are delivering care daily in overcrowded or unsuitable places.
Some 91 per cent said the care had been unsafe.
Some claimed they had cared for as many as 40 patients in a single corridor – some blocking fire exits or parked next to vending machines.
One nurse specifically recalled how she ‘broke’ after seeing the lack of care a 90-year-old woman with dementia was subjected to.
‘Seeing that lady, frightened and subjected to animal-like conditions is what broke me,’ she said. ‘At the end of that shift, I handed in my notice with no job to go to.’
Reacting to the report, Health Secretary Wes Streeting told MPs ‘corridor care’ was ‘undignified’ but warned that patients were still likely to suffer it next winter.
A previous analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine suggested 12-hour waits caused more than 250 needless deaths a week in 2023.
Professor Julian Redhead, NHS National Clinical Director for urgent and emergency care said: ‘While it is encouraging news that flu cases are no longer increasing, hospitals are not out of the woods yet.
‘Staff are working incredibly hard in sometimes challenging surroundings, but winter viruses are much higher than usual for this time of year, and this coupled with the cold snap and problems discharging patients means hospitals are jampacked with patients – even as more beds have been opened to manage increased demand.
‘With pressures on hospitals still formidable, it’s vital people continue to use NHS services in the normal way – using 111 and 111 online if you need advice and support for health conditions, and only using 999 or attend A&E in life-threatening emergencies.’
