More than 1,300 patients a month in England are dying needlessly because of long A&E waits, according to new analysis from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) – a tenfold increase over the past decade. The figures show that approximately 300 deaths linked to prolonged waits occurred every week in 2025, compared with just 30 a week in 2015.
Methodology behind the estimates
The RCEM’s excess death calculations are based on a study of more than 5 million NHS patients published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021. That research found one excess death for every 72 patients who spent between eight and 12 hours in A&E before being admitted to a hospital bed. The risk of death began to increase after five hours of waiting and rose further with longer waits. Applying this ratio to official waiting-time data, the RCEM estimates that 15,860 excess deaths occurred in 2025 that were associated with long stays in emergency departments. That figure was slightly lower than the 16,644 recorded in 2024, but nearly ten times the 1,657 deaths estimated for 2015.
Dr Ian Higginson, the president of the RCEM and an emergency medicine consultant, said the scale of the loss was shocking. “We have to ask why this awful problem isn’t the subject of relentless focus and political conversation. The number of deaths linked to long stays in our emergency departments explicitly show the system is failing the patients it is meant to be caring for,” he said.
He described the impact on frontline staff: “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. To make things worse we are being asked to focus on the least sick patients to try and marginally improve headline statistics, rather than on those who need our services the most.” Higginson added that the lack of meaningful action was “frustrating”, accusing ministers of recycling “ideas that haven’t ever worked, performance data that doesn’t reflect reality, and a focus on perceived ‘quick fixes’.”
Professor Nicola Ranger, general secretary and chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), called the death toll “a catastrophe that has been unfolding unchecked in our hospitals for far too long”. She said: “To bring this to an end, we need system-wide, long-term, sustainable solutions. This must include urgent investment in hospital beds and the nursing workforce, while also improving access to primary care, investing in community nursing and unlocking capacity in social care.” Every day without action was a failure that had “devastating consequences” for patients, she added.
Dr Vicky Price, president of the Society for Acute Medicine, described the deaths as a source of “national shame” and said overcrowding in A&Es was getting worse.
Government response
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said it was unacceptable for patients to face long waits for emergency care, and offered condolences to bereaved families. A spokesperson said: “While A&E waiting times are at their lowest level in half a decade, we know there is more to do. That is why we are investing over £215m in 40 new and expanded same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres across England to reduce pressure on A&E.” The government also said it was deploying specialist teams to NHS trusts experiencing the worst levels of so-called corridor care in an effort to eradicate it.
Despite the government’s claim that waiting times have improved, data from the House of Commons Library shows a substantial rise in the proportion of patients waiting more than four hours in A&E between 2015 and 2020, peaking at 50.4% in December 2022. In March 2026, 36.2% of patients still waited over four hours. The number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for admission after a decision to admit has also risen sharply since mid-2021. In January 2026, 71,517 patients experienced such delays – 13% of all emergency admissions. In February 2026, over 46,000 patients waited more than 12 hours from the decision to admit to being admitted.
Additional research published in the BMJ in January 2025, analysing Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, found that compared with patients who spent two hours in A&E, the odds of death within 30 days of discharge were 1.1 times higher for those waiting three hours, 1.6 times higher for six hours, 1.9 times for nine hours, and 2.1 times for 12 hours. For a 20-year-old patient, the odds were 4.6 times higher after a 12-hour wait.
The RCEM has disputed the government’s assertion that new urgent treatment centres (UTCs) will tackle corridor care, arguing that UTCs focus on less unwell patients while corridors are filled by the most unwell or those with mental health needs. The RCN has highlighted that patients are routinely left waiting for hours, sometimes days, in unsuitable and degrading conditions. Meanwhile, the RCEM’s analysis shows that median waiting times for all A&E patients reached a high of three hours 31 minutes in December 2022, and the median wait for patients requiring admission was five hours 21 minutes in December 2019. In December 2025, that had fallen slightly to four hours 36 minutes.
Ambulance response times have also suffered. In December 2022, average response times for Category 2 calls – such as suspected heart attacks – exceeded one hour 30 minutes, far beyond the 18-minute target.
The situation is compounded by a mental health crisis among children and young people. The RCN reports that around half a million children and young people have presented to A&E in a mental health crisis since 2019, with some facing waits of up to three days. Waits of 12 hours or more for children in mental health crisis have more than tripled.
Dr Higginson warned that without a shift in focus toward patients who experience the longest waits, A&Es across England would remain in “constant distress”. He added: “Whilst we welcome the government’s stated commitment to eliminate corridor care, until we prioritise patients who experience long waits for admission, we will not get to the bottom of the whole issue.”