Nearly 20,000 people a day are waiting at least four hours in A&E amid a dramatic collapse in NHS performance.
Patients are dying avoidably as record numbers spend at least 12 hours stuck on a trolley in hospital corridors waiting for a bed to become available, doctors’ leaders say. Waiting times are worse than ever across almost all measures, including cancer and planned surgery, according to monthly NHS England performance statistics.
Health chiefs expect the “unacceptably poor” situation to deteriorate over winter, as nurses prepare to walk out before Christmas in their first ever national strike, potentially disrupting care for hundreds of thousands of patients.
In October a record 594,389 patients waited beyond the four-hour target to be seen in A&E, 30 per cent
