A&E patients left with long waits at Black Country hospitals
Thousands of patients waited in A&E departments in the Black Country for four hours or longer to be admitted, transferred or discharged in January, figures show.
These figures formed part of the worst A&E waiting times across England since records began, despite lower levels of flu and norovirus than last year.
One in three A&E patients at Walsall Healthcare trust waited longer than four hours.
The NHS’s target is for 95 per cent of patients to be dealt with in four hours, but at Walsall Healthcare trust, it was just 67 per cent.
The figure was also low at Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust, where just 71 per cent were treated on time. A total of 3,956 waited more than four hours.
More than 2,000 were kept waiting Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust where the figure was 81 per cent.
NHS leaders said the figures show the “true scale of this crisis facing our systems”.
At New Cross, which is run by the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, in January there were 12,311 emergency attendances.
Of those, 2,377 patients waited more than four hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged.
The NHS’s target is for 95 per cent of patients to be dealt with in four hours, but at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, it was just 81 per cent.
This was better than January 2018, when 74 per cent of patients were seen within four hours.
Across England, the number of patients waiting more than four hours was more than 320,000 in January 2019, with just 84 per cent being treated, admitted or discharged within the target time.
This is the worst performance since comparable records began.
The last time trusts across the England hit the 95 per cent target was July 2015.
Royal College of Emergency Medicine president, Dr Taj Hassan, said: “Sadly the situation afflicting our emergency departments has become seemingly normalised with a ‘chronic crisis mode’ that does not allow staff to deliver the quality of care they would wish and patients should rightly expect.
“The evidence on resultant crowding in departments is clear – it adds to the risk of harm to patients leading to excess deaths and disability.
“These figures make clear the true scale of this crisis facing our systems.”
An NHS England spokesman said emergency departments had faced “real pressure, particularly over the past few weeks”.
