Emergency Department 12-hour length of stay data must be meaningful and transparent

20 April 2023

Responding to the latest Emergency Department performance figures for March 2023 for Wales, Dr Suresh Pillai, Vice President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Wales, said:

“The data are stark. Patients continue to face long-waits. Hardworking staff are doing their best to mitigate the harm to patients that we know is associated with these delays to care. Recently in England, 12-hour data measured from the time of arrival was made publicly available in a step towards more transparent and meaningful metrics that better reflects the patient’s journey and show the true scale of long waits. In Wales, many patients are still hidden from the data, masked by clinical and operational exclusions, classified as breach exemptions.

“The Health Minister and the Welsh Government must follow the example of NHS England to ensure data are meaningful and transparent and no patient is excluded. We can only tackle the crisis at its root and eliminate the delays to care and overcrowding when we can see the full picture with no exceptions.

“The delays and dilution to care are driven by high bed occupancy, a low bed base, and an inability to discharge patients in a timely way due to unresponsive social care. We cannot admit patients from Emergency Departments to a bed – causing delays, overcrowding and poor flow through our hospitals. We must see faster action and improvements around social care, including bolstering the social care workforce to ensure patients can be supported when being admitted to or discharged from hospitals.

“We remain supportive of the Health Minister’s six-goal programme, but we need to see quicker, more urgent and tangible action to tackle the crisis. In Wales, there is a severe retention and recruitment crisis in Emergency Medicine. We must do all we can to retain existing staff and keep them delivering for patients, while simultaneously recruiting staff into Emergency Medicine. A failure to either recruit or retain staff is a failure to our patients. It is essential that workforce is a priority of this government.”

-ENDS-

Notes to editor

The latest Emergency Department performance figures for March 2023 published by the Welsh government show:

• There were 65,832 attendances to major Emergency Departments,
  • This is 14.7% more than the previous month (57,418) and 0.1% less than in March 2022 (65,930).
• Overall, 59.9% of patients in major Emergency Departments were admitted, transferred, or discharged within four-ours from arrival
  • This is the first drop in four-hour performance since December 2022
• 2% of major Emergency Department attendances waited more than 8 hours (15,269 patients)
  • This is 25.1% more than the previous month
  • This is equal to nearly one in four patients
• 1% of major Emergency Department attendances waited more than 12-hours (9,924 patients).
  • This is 24.4% more than the previous month
  • This is the lowest figure since July 2021
  • This is equal to nearly one in seven patients
• There were a daily average of 6,481 general and acute beds in service
  • This is 43 more than the previous month
• Average monthly bed occupancy was 95.51%
• When we compare bed data for March 2022 with March 2023, there has been an average increase of 1.2% in general and acute beds in service. By comparison there has been an 3.7% increase in general and acute beds occupied.
  • This demonstrates that the number of beds in service is not keeping up with patient needs.

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