Hospital trusts are again failing to meet A&E targets - with almost 40,000 people left waiting for over 12 hours in A&Es in England in March.
National figures for last month showed little over half of people attending major NHS A&E departments across England were seen within four fours.
The NHS has targets to see 95.0% of patients within four hours - however, in March, just 56.8% were seen within that time.
That figure doesn’t include other A&E departments though, such as walk-in centres.
However, when these numbers are included the average improves to 71.5% of patients, which remains behind target.
A total of 39,671 patients had waits of over 12 hours once a decision had been made to admit them - one in every 14 patients (7.5%).
Ambulance services are also failing to meet their targets across England.
The average response time for life threatening Category 1 calls is eight minutes 49 seconds.
That’s compared to a target of seven minutes.
Category 2 calls - which can include things like suspected strokes - have an average response time of 39 minutes 33 seconds - almost double the target of 18 minutes.
The country’s health service has been under immense pressure in recent years, worsened considerably by the Covid pandemic which brought it to its knees.
One way this manifests is in huge wait times at A&E that has previously seen ambulances queuing just to drop off patients.
Data for March has revealed that at 23 NHS trusts over half of patients had to wait over four hours from arriving to being admitted in the emergency department.
Following being admitted, patients could face further waits for treatment.
This is for patients in the type 1 category, the emergency department, and doesn’t include patients attending type 2, specialist services like dental or ophthalmology, or type 3, urgent trauma centres.
The increasing waits are down to a number of factors that affect the NHS nationwide.
One significant and persistent problem is the issue of social discharge, and trusts and hospitals being unable to free up their beds and move people onwards into care settings.
In January of this year, NHS data shows that in England there were over 14,000 beds that were taken up by patients who no longer needed to be there.
