Hundreds of thousands of patients were forced to wait longer than they should for time-critical care, latest figures show

The NHS recorded its worst ever performance in the first month of the year as services struggled to cope with unprecedented demand for A&E care, hospital beds and ambulances.

Hundreds of thousands of patients were forced to wait longer than they should for time-critical care as the NHS missed almost all its key waiting time targets.

The latest monthly performance figures, released on Thursday by NHS England, show that hospitals buckled badly during January, partly because the traditional “winter pressures” arrived later than usual.

A total of 212,136 patients waited more than the maximum four hours to be admitted, transferred or discharged from hospital A&E units – the highest number ever. Hospitals only treated 83% of A&E patients within four hours, way below the 95% standard they are meant to achieve.

The largest number of patients ever – 263,445 – waited more than the supposed maximum of 18 weeks to have planned care in hospital, such as a hernia or cataract operation.

Record numbers of cancer patients were also not seen within NHS-wide time limits, with hospitals breaching two of the eight waiting time targets covering the disease.

Only 81% of people referred by their GP to have a first treatment for cancer within 62 days got it – it should be 85%.

Cancer services also failed to ensure that 93% of patients with suspected breast cancer saw a consultant for the first time within two weeks, managing 92.4%.

NHS performance in key areas of care has been declining for several years. For example, hospitals failed to treat 92% of patients awaiting non-urgent care within 18 weeks for the first time in December 2015. But the latest statistics are the grimmest set it has posted since records began.

The number of patients waiting at least four hours on a trolley to be admitted hit a record 51,545 in January – an almost four-fold increase on the 13,162 who did so in the same month in 2011.



Hospitals also missed the target of ensuring that 99% of patients advised to have a diagnostic test within six weeks did so in that timeframe. While the NHS did 1.68m such tests in January, 2.1% of patients had to wait longer than six weeks.



Of the most urgent calls for an ambulance – known as Red 1 calls, for those suffering a cardiac arrest, for example – 69.9% were responded to within the required eight minutes, well below the target of 75%. January was the eighth month in a row in which that target was missed.



The 10 NHS regional ambulance services also breached the target for responding to Red 2 calls, which cover less serious but still potentially life-threatening illnesses. They sent a blue-light ambulance to only 63.3% of them within eight minutes – the 24th month in a row in which the 75% target has been missed.



NHS England said the service’s performance against the 18-week referral to treatment (RTT) target for non-urgent care was 92%. The number of people on that waiting list has reached a record 3,291,099.



In addition, 83,491 people had to wait more than 26 weeks for such care, 9,382 endured a delay of more than 39 weeks and 727 were forced to wait more than a year for their planned treatment.

The number of patients who were fit to leave hospital but could not be discharged also hit a new record high – 5,799 – as were the number of bed days lost to such “delayed transfers of care”. That reached 103,491 in January, slightly up on the 103,163 recorded in January 2015.



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NHS England blamed a huge rise in demand for care in January, compared with the previous month and the same month in 2015, for the widespread breaching of targets.



Richard Barker, the service’s interim national director of commissioning operations and information, said: “We saw record demands on our frontline services in January with 1.9 million people walking through the doors of A&E. That represents an increase of 175,000 more patients compared with the same month last year, up by more than 10%. And 484,568 emergency admissions represent a similar hike, up by 4.6%.

“Against this backdrop it’s not surprising hospitals saw a dip in their A&E performance, and it is a credit to all those working in emergency care that we are still admitting, treating and discharging almost nine out of 10 patients within four hours. Winter pressures have come late this year with a sustained cold period and an increase in seasonal infections.”

Heidi Alexander, the shadow health secretary, said the “shocking” figures showed that the government’s health policies were failing both patients and the NHS.

“Waiting time targets exists to provide swift access to care and they have now been missed so often that failure has become the norm. On this government’s watch more patients are waiting too long for treatment, more ambulances are taking too long to arrive and more older people are stuck in hospital because they cannot be safely discharged,” she said.

Cuts to the number of trainee nurses and to social care meant this was “a crisis of their own making”, she added.

Independent Age, the charity for older people, warned that senior citizens were among the patient groups worst affected by the declining performance.

Janet Morrison, its chief executive, said: “This January saw ambulance response targets missed for the eighth month in a row, the worst performance against the A&E waiting times target since data was first collected in August 2010 and the highest number of healthy patients stuck in hospital beds in any month since August 2010.

“It is taking longer to get patients to hospital, they are waiting longer once they are there and are more likely to be stuck in a hospital bed because support is not in place to discharge them. As the largest group of service users in the NHS, older people are going to feel the impact of these failures.”

