17 December 2025
Staff dreading coming to work.
No resuscitation space.
EDs over capacity with patients being cared for in non-clinical areas.
Patients enduring extreme long waits.
Patients being exposed to harm.
These are just a few examples of the reality facing staff and patients in Emergency Departments across Northern Ireland that have been captured in a new survey, published today (17 December 2025) by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
Lead consultants in all nine major EDs completed a ‘snapshot poll’ on Monday morning last week (8 December 2025) to capture the situation in A&E, focusing on overcrowding, waiting times, corridor care, and the standard of care patients were receiving.
It found:
- Across all nine EDs, 401 people were waiting for inpatient beds and nearly half of these patients (49%) were receiving care in a non-designated space such as a corridor, the floor, or on a chair.
- There is just no more space in Northern Ireland’s EDs; patients are being forced to share ‘private’ assessment cubicles or are being treated in non-designated areas while they wait for a hospital bed. ED cubicle occupancy of patients waiting for an inpatient bed was at 137%.
- One patient had been waiting in the ED for 124 hours when the data was recorded. That is equivalent to more than five days.
- All clinicians who responded (100%) believe that patients are coming to harm in current conditions
- Every department reported that a major reason for overcrowding was delayed discharges due to lack of social care arrangements.
Personal experiences which consultants have shared reveal the harrowing reality they are facing.
One respondent stated their ED was above capacity with “no resuscitation space, ten-hour waits at the front door, and ambulance offloads waiting eight hours”, adding “it feels frankly unsafe.”
Another said morale amongst staff “is at an all-time low; people dread coming to work because cannot deliver the high standard of care we strive for and staff feel vulnerable and exposed.”
And one lead consultant wrote “staff are beyond ****** off with the perpetual failure of our healthcare leaders to deliver any improvement for patients and staff alike.”
RCEM’s Vice President for Northern Ireland, Dr Michael Perry, said, “Frontline Emergency Medicine doctors have spoken – the situation in our EDs, put simply, is just awful.
“Our members and their colleagues are putting on their scrubs every day knowing that they will be trying their best to deliver quality care in spaces that were never designed for care to be delivered in – on trolleys in corridors, chairs and even, shamefully, on the floor.
“These are patients, who are arriving to our EDs, who are vulnerable, sick and in need of care. Yet they are enduring these conditions for hours and hours and hours. And as this survey reveals, for some, it leads into days.
“It’s not just degrading, and demoralising – this is where the harm lies. Last year, there were 1,122 deaths associated with long A&E waits in our country. These are people, loved ones. I fear what this number will be for 2025.
“All of this is a symptom of the system not functioning as it should. We can’t move patients out of our departments because there’s a lack of available ward beds for them to be moved to, meaning they become stuck. Our walls aren’t elastic, so people end up in areas where they should never be receiving care in or stuck in ambulances waiting to even get through our doors.
“We cannot go on like this. RCEM has made a series of urgent recommendations to the Northern Ireland Executive, including the need to spread responsibility for patient flow across the hospital network, to bring back a healthcare system that we once were proud of.”