Nearly 2m waiting over four hours since A&E target last hit

Almost two million people have waited more than four hours in A&E since the last time the Scottish Government’s target was hit, figures show.

The Government aims for 95% of people each week to be seen and subsequently admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours in the country’s emergency departments.

But that figure has not been hit since the week of July 12 2020, in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the number of people going to hospital plummeted.

According to analysis by the Scottish Lib Dems, since the target was last hit, 1,921,053 people waited four hours or more.

Elsewhere, 237,623 people waited more than 12 hours during that period and 588,480 people waited longer than eight hours.

First Minister John Swinney has pinpointed the NHS improvement as key for his Government, announcing this week an £85 million investment in Hospital at Home provision in an attempt to keep people out of hospitals and reduce delayed discharge, as well as placing frailty teams in A&E units to divert elderly patients to other services and free up emergency care.

Lib Dem MP Wendy Chamberlain said: “Under this SNP government, A&E has been mired in crisis for years.

“Staff are stuck working under pressure-cooker conditions and patients are stuck having to wait hours for vital care.

“We are now on our fourth different Health Secretary since this SNP government last met the A&E waiting time target.

“Jeane Freeman, Humza Yousaf and Michael Matheson have all come and gone without making a dent and it looks as if Neil Gray will go the same way.”

She added: “Alongside efforts to alleviate the pressure on A&E and ambulance staff, we need to invest in care services to get people out of hospital and free up space.

“That’s why Scottish Liberal Democrats fought for more money for social care in the budget and back a new UK-wide minimum wage for care workers that is £2 higher.”

Scottish Tory public health spokesman Brian Whittle said: “Under the SNP, millions of patients have suffered because they can’t meet their own targets.

“Real lives are being lost to delays that could and should have been avoided.

“Dedicated frontline staff are working tirelessly for their patients, but they’re had the carpet pulled from under them by successive nationalist health secretaries.

“The SNP still don’t have a credible plan to fix this crisis. This is a national scandal.”

Scottish Labour’s deputy leader Jackie Baillie said: “These stark figures lay bare the human cost of SNP incompetence.

“Scots have lost their lives as a result of these dangerously long waits and many more have suffered in agony for hours on end.

“Year after year, an array of different SNP health secretaries and first ministers have all promised to fix the crisis in our NHS, but they have all failed.

“If the SNP was capable of fixing this mess it would have done it by now – our NHS needs a new direction and a new government with Scottish Labour.”

The Scottish Government has been contacted for comment.