Hospital emergency departments are having their busiest ever summer as waiting lists rise for the third month in a row, new figures from NHS England show today. Some 4.6 million patients attended A&E over the last two months – higher than any other June and July.
The latest performance data shows that the three busiest ever months for emergency staff have been in 2024 – 77,945 attendances per day in May, 76,469 in June and 74,459 in March. More than three quarters (75.2 per cent) of patients within four hours in A&E in July, the highest proportion since September 2021 but still well below the target of 95 per cent.
Meanwhile, the waiting list for routine hospital treatment in England has risen for the third month in a row. An estimated 7.62 million treatments were waiting to be carried out at the end of June, relating to 6.
39 million patients – up slightly from 7.60 million treatments and 6.37 million patients at the end of May, NHS England said.
The list hit a record high in September 2023 with 7.77 million treatments and 6.50 million patients, after which the figures fell for several months before starting to rise again from April this year.
Some 2,621 patients in England had been waiting more than 18 months to start routine treatment at the end of June, down sharply from 4,597 in May. The Government and NHS England set the ambition of eliminating all waits of more than 18 months by April 2023, excluding exceptionally complex cases or patients who choose to wait longer. There were 58,024 patients who had been waiting more than 65 weeks to start treatment at the end of June, up from 55,955 in May.
The target to eliminate all waits of more than 65 weeks is now September 2024, having previously been March 2024. A total of 302,693 people in England had been waiting more than 52 weeks to start routine hospital treatment at the end of June, down slightly from 307,500 at the end of May. Officials have set the ambition of eliminating all waits of more than a year by March 2025.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “These figures confirm that 14 years of Conservative neglect left the NHS broken, waiting lists rising, and patients failed. Never again should the Conservatives be trusted with our health service. This Labour government has already agreed a pay offer to end the junior doctors strike.
In contrast, Conservative Health Ministers hadn’t even bothered to meet the junior doctors since March. “It will take time to turn the NHS around. But we are working night and day to get the NHS back on its feet, so it can once again be there for us all when we need it.
” Services faced four days of industrial action by junior doctors – from Thursday 27 June to Tuesday 2 July – with almost 62,000 acute appointments needing to be rescheduled, bringing the total cumulative impact on appointments since strikes first began to nearly 1.5 million..
