A&E deaths more than doubled at the height of the NHS winter crisis, leaving wards struggling at breaking point.
An exclusive Mirror investigation has revealed the shocking reality of causalities within the NHS' emergency rooms.
This winter the health service was battered by a number of cumulative factors which put massive strain on workers and resources, leaving wards at breaking point in December 2022.
Compared to the historic average, deaths in the country's A&E's were more than doubled.
Alongside that, a record low of just 65% of patients were seen within four hours of arrival, compared to the target of 95%.
This means over one third of patients were left waiting hours to receive any kind of care.
Meanwhile, a record high of 54,532 patients had to wait over 12 hours for admission.
A new investigation from the Reach Data Unit can now reveal that there was a huge rise in the number of deaths in A&E across this winter.
Freedom of Information requests were sent to every NHS trust in England asking for the number of people to have died in their A&E departments each month, with 84 trusts providing figures.
Shocking graphs reveal the horrific scale of the crisis that gripped the NHS this winter, with the data revealing 2,242 people died in emergency departments during December.
This is more than double the average monthly number of A&E deaths and is equal to more than 73 people dying every day across the month.
Even when just comparing deaths to previous Decembers, the figure for 2022 is 90% higher than the average in the previous four years.
An average of 972 people have died at A&Es to have responded to our FOI requests each month since the start of 2018.
A total of 28 different trusts saw their December deaths more than double between 2021 and 2022.
The largest increase was at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which went from seven deaths in 2021 to 32 in 2022. That’s more than four times as many.
The next largest increase was at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where the number of December deaths increased from 11 in 2021 to 41 in 2022.
In North Cumbria Integrated Care NHS Foundation Trust, meanwhile, deaths in A&E went from seven in 2021 to 24 in 2022.
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust saw deaths increase from 20 to 57, in East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust they went from six to 17, in Airedale NHS Foundation Trust they went from four to 11, and in County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust they went from 19 to 52.
An NHS spokesperson said: “This simplistic analysis only looks at one part of the picture, and does not take into account factors like level of demand - winter saw record numbers using urgent and emergency care, with the ‘twindemic’ of Covid and flu adding to significant pressure, and published data shows that December 2022 was the busiest month on record for A&Es with 2.28 million patients attending.
“Our urgent and emergency recovery plan sets out how we will boost capacity and cut waits further ahead of next winter, with thousands more beds, hundreds of new ambulances and measures to improve patient flow - we are already seeing the results of that work, with recent data showing ambulance response times are the fastest they have been for almost two years, and A&E performance has also improved.”
