A new analysis from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has put a stark figure on the strain inside England's hospitals, estimating that nearly 16,000 deaths last year were linked to long waits in emergency departments. The college says the toll relates to patients who endured lengthy stays in A&E during 2025. According to the report, the number of deaths associated with these long waits has risen almost tenfold over the past decade, underlining how the problem has deepened over time.
The college's president, Dr Ian Higginson, said the central message was that nearly 16,000 patients lost their lives in association with long stays in emergency departments, and that the same thing is continuing to happen now. He framed the issue in human terms, stressing that these were people dying while the underlying problems went unresolved. It was for that reason, he said, that the college had pulled the report together and was calling for the matter to be treated as a priority by the government.
Pressed on the government's assertion that waiting lists are falling and the situation is improving, Higginson drew a sharp distinction between different parts of the system. He acknowledged that waiting lists for elective patients, those needing routine operations, are starting to improve, which he called good news. But he insisted that when it comes to the urgent and emergency care system, things are not getting better, and that the root causes are simply not being addressed because they sit in the too hard basket.
The president went further, suggesting that the headline improvements can serve as a distraction from the deeper failures. He argued that there was a tendency to point to new urgent treatment centres or other initiatives while the fundamental problems remained untouched. In his words, the focus on what looks good can amount to a look over here while the real problem sits over there, leaving emergency patients without the attention they need.
Higginson also raised pointed concerns about how performance data is handled within the urgent care system. He said that for years the data around the four hour standard had been manipulated, and that there were various tricks played around some of the twelve hour figures, even in the publicly reported numbers. He described how ambulance handover times can be improved on paper by offloading patients into corridors, a practice that worsens overcrowding while making one set of data look better.
That scepticism extended to figures still to be released, with the president saying the college was wary of the corridor care data about to come out. His broader warning was that while attention is focused on making the numbers look good for headlines, the problems themselves are not being tackled. He repeated that the patients caught up in the system really matter and are not being afforded the priority they deserve.
The report also lands against a backdrop of frequent change at the top of the health brief. Asked about the recently appointed health secretary, James Murray, Higginson said the college had not yet met him and so could not say whether it had hopes for his tenure, while adding that it looked forward to meeting him and offering its expertise. The college's overarching demand remained that emergency care be moved up the list of government priorities so that the rising death toll can be confronted.