Dire A&E waits mean a QUARTER of patients at NHS's busiest hospitals face ... trends now
Worsening A&E waits mean a quarter of patients seeking emergency care now face 12-hour delays at England's busiest hospitals.
Nationally, almost 150,000 patients (11.3 per cent) were left languishing in crowded casualty units for at least half a day in February alone.
Rates were above 20 per cent in nine NHS trusts dotted across Lancashire, Cornwall and Kent.
It comes after a shocking study today suggested dire waits in A&E for hospital beds caused more than 250 needless deaths a week last year, with patients forced to wait in crowded rooms and corridors or on trolleys.
MailOnline's probe revealed fewer than a third of patients attending A&E are seen within four hours at the country's worst-performing trusts. One in four even have to wait more than 12 hours at some NHS hospitals, illustrating the extent of the crisis which has seen patients forced to sleep on the floor or sat on trolleys in hospital corridors as they wait for a bed
Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said 'urgent intervention' is needed to solve the crisis.
Experts fear the situation is only going to get worse, with the ailing NHS stuck in an 'eternal winter' amid staffing shortages and unprecedented demand.
Bed-blocking – where patients who are fit to leave hospital can't because of a lack of capacity in the social care sector – and the never-ending calendar of strikes has only fuelled the problem, insiders say.
NHS England figures for February show that 27.1 per cent of patients attending A&E at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust waited at least 12 hours from arrival to be seen.
Similarly high levels were logged at The Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust (25.1 per cent), United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust and Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (both 23.7 per cent).
For comparison, rates stood at just 0.6 per cent at the Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust.
The RCEM, using data from 5million patients, calculated one excess death happened for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in A&E.
NHS statistics do not track the number of casualty patients who spend at least eight hours waiting to be seen. Health bosses do, however, log 12-hour delays.
Figures covering the last year show that more than 440,000 A&E patients in England spent 12 hours waiting for treatment.
That only counts 'trolley waits' — the time between medics deciding a patient needs to be admitted and when they actually are given a bed.
Critics say this drastically underplays the scale of the NHS casualty crisis, given that patients may have arrived hours before their condition was deemed serious enough for further treatment.
When using this method, the true toll of patients left to wait 12 hours or more in A&E over the past year stands closer to 1.6million.
Around 65 per cent of waits of this length are for a hospital bed, according to an FOI by the RCEM.
Modelling by the RCEM suggests that around 270 patients made to wait 12 hours will have died due to
