23 April 2026
The Northern Ireland Executive must immediately take action or more lives will be lost to the Emergency Care crisis.
That’s the urgent message from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) today, as the latest official statistics show that waiting times for patients in Northern Ireland’s Emergency Departments are the worst they have ever been.
The stats, which cover January-March 2026, showed that almost a quarter (23.5%, or an average of 12,309 patients per month) of all major ED attendances waited more than 12 hours before being discharged, admitted or transferred. A decade ago, only 1% of patients waited this long.
Meanwhile, less than a third (30.5%) were in and out of the department within the target of four hours.
These represent the worst four- and 12-hour performance for Northern Irish EDs for any quarter on record.
Worse still, a truly staggering 1,280 patients waited more than two and a half days.
Dr Sara McGurk, RCEM Northern Ireland Vice Chair, said of the figures: “The state of our Emergency Care system is utterly horrifying.
“These figures show the true scale of the crisis our Emergency Departments have been grappling with over winter.
“It’s chaos in our departments. We have patients lining corridors facing waits for beds which can be measured in days.
“These patients are being put at risk of deterioration, or even death, by this overcrowding of departments.
“Meanwhile, the patients who can pass through, or be discharged from, our departments within four hours are now firmly in the minority.
“It is becoming difficult to even perform the basics of emergency care with overcrowding as bad as it is.
“Things are dire and, as the data shows, the worst they have ever been.”
Today’s analysis follows the publication of RCEM’s State of Emergency Care in Northern Ireland report, which estimated that 1,032 excess deaths last year could be attributed to long waits for admission.
Dr McGurk added: “Our members are working themselves to the bone just keeping this system afloat – but without support from health service and political leaders, the cracks will continue to grow.
“This is a fixable problem – and we need policymakers to focus on the interventions we know work: speeding up discharge from the ‘back door’ of hospitals and freeing up beds.
“If this is not done, this permacrisis will not end any time soon and more grim milestones will be crossed.”
Today’s figures also showed:
- More than 400 (449) admitted patients waited more than 3 days in the ED in January alone
- The average (median) wait time for patients who went on to be admitted into a hospital bed was around 16 hours, the highest ever for any quarter on record
More analysis and visualisation of the data can be found here.