28 October 2025
A plan which outlines NHS England’s priorities for the next three years ‘offers no meaningful roadmap’ to reduce dangerous long waits in Emergency Departments.
That’s the assessment of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine following the publication of NHS England’s Medium Term Planning Framework 2026/27 to 2028/29 which was released last week (24 October 2025).
It contains a range of pledges and ambitions for the healthcare sector over the next three financial years with the aim to improve the NHS. It details where they should focus attention, and what targets are to be prioritised.
Related to Urgent and Emergency Care, NHS England has committed to:
- Improve A&E waiting times with a minimum of 85% of patients seen within four hours – a step up from the 78% target set for this year but still far short of the constitutional standard of 95%
- Getting category 2 ambulance response times to an average of no more than 18 minutes
- Reduce the number of people who wait over 12 hours, without any commitment as to what extent
It comes as 1,731,737 people waited 12 hours or more to be admitted, discharged or transferred from major EDs in England last year.
That’s 211,159 more patients who endured these waits when compared to 2023.
NHSE has heavily focused on the use of technology in the plan, and on concepts such as ‘UTC-first’.
Meanwhile there is only one sentence on the need for a whole-system effort to reduce delayed discharges. The plan therefore misses an opportunity to tackle emergency care for the most seriously sick, injured and vulnerable patients in our departments. These are the patients most likely to come to harm as a result of overcrowding.Dr Ian Higginson, President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said, “This plan has been described by NHS England as the ‘the most ambitious plan’ the government has published ‘in a generation’.
“However, it lacks ambition where it is needed the most – extremely long waits of 12 hours and more.
“The plan offers no target or meaningful roadmap to reduce these waits. And we know this is where the risk to patient safety lies – with over 16,600 deaths associated with long waits last year.
“Fundamentally, long stays and so called ‘corridor care’ are caused by lack of capacity in, and flow through, our hospitals
“Attempting to direct less sick people away from Emergency Departments to other parts of the system, such as Urgent Treatment Centres, can improve their experience and reduce some pressure in our waiting rooms. Avoiding admission where possible, is also what both patients and clinicians want.
“However, the sickest patients will still need to come into hospital, and those are the ones who our system fails the most. The plan will do little to help these vulnerable people who are left stranded in Emergency Departments, in corridors and cupboards, for hours or days, because of a lack of available inpatient beds. They deserve better than this.
“There needs to be equal attention at the ‘back door’ of our hospitals as there is at the ‘front door’. We look forward to continuing discussions with politicians, leaders and other policy makers to improve conditions in Emergency Departments for our patients and the teams looking after them.”