Fifth of A&E patients wait longer than four hours at Homerton Healthcare Trust

A fifth of patients seeking A&E care at Homerton Healthcare Trust waited longer than four hours to be dealt with last month, figures show.

NHS guidance states that 95% of patients attending accident and emergency departments should be admitted to hospital, transferred elsewhere or discharged within four hours.

But Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust fell well behind that target in November, when just 80% of the 10,852 attendances at type 1 A&E departments were dealt with within four hours, according to figures from NHS England.

Type 1 departments are those which provide major emergency services – with full resuscitation equipment and 24-hour consultant-led care – and account for the majority of attendances nationally.

It means 20% of patients attending major A&E at Homerton Healthcare Trust waited longer than four hours to be seen last month, compared to 23% in October, and 13% in November 2021.

At Homerton Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust:

In November:

There were 25 booked appointments, down from 52 in October

241 patients waited longer than four hours for treatment following a decision to admit – 2% of patients

Of those, 29 were delayed by more than 12 hours

Separate NHS Digital data reveals that in October:

The median time to treatment was 105 minutes. The median average is used to ensure figures are not skewed by particularly long or short waiting times

Around 5% of patients left before being treated