RCEM calculates 268 people are likely to have died each week in 2023 while waiting up to 12 hours for a bed
Almost 14,000 people died needlessly last year in England while waiting in A&E for up to 12 hours a new estimate suggests.
Calculations by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) based on a large study of excess deaths and waiting times show that 268 people are likely to have died each week in 2023 because of excessive waits in emergency departments.
The estimate used a study of more than 5 million NHS patients published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021, which found one excess death for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in an A&E department.
The risk of death started to increase after five hours and got worse with longer waiting times, the study found.
It’s almost as bad in the U.S.
I’ve been to the ER three times in the past two years. The fastest time I was admitted was 45 minutes (the wait time was advertised outside as 8 minutes) when it was very early in the morning and we were literally the only ones in the waiting room. The shortest time I was there was 6 hours.
Admittedly, I was not dying, so I was probably not a priority, but that’s pretty nuts.
Also, I don’t live in a big city. The city has a population of less than 60,000 and two hospitals. It still took that long.
Edit: also, a prisoner from the federal prison came in after me and left before me. And he was probably not dying either because they didn’t exactly rush in to see him. Fun to hear his ankle chains rattling around and thinking about how he was suffering from that as well while I was in pain though.
This is usually worse in the poor parts of town. I worked for a hospital system and the staffing was excellent where everyone was in just to recover from a face lift. Closed down the maternity ward because it just wasn’t profitable. Healthcare should not be for profit in this manner. It’s gross.
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In the US I want to know how many people die from insurance, dragging their feet, or denying things your Dr. Thinks is necessary or just how much worse you gotten waiting for “pre-authorization”.
I’m sure all the cancer patients who wait 2 to 4 weeks to get their insurance to approve or deny caused a ton of harm. Let’s not mention if your insurance only covers one hospital and you needlessly need to only be stabilized and then shipped there to get any treatment further delaying care.
Why isn’t it documented how many people insurances kill or cause greater harm too, with their nonmedical opinion.
Not to mention reducing the capacity of our physicians who have to waste hours fighting denials or doing peer to peers with a doctor in the wrong field.
I bet it would be hundreds of thousands of deaths…
Did I miss it? Which part of the article is about US healthcare?
Maybe I jumped a step but the article felt like a hit on universal health care and I wanted to spell out how much worse we have it. I feel like this is what everyone points to preventing us from getting universal healthcare, so it’s connected through healthcare itself as a topic.
Also the UKs healthcare has been a big target for conservative to attack and this is how they do it, underfund, overstress something and then point to it as a failure that needs to be dismantled where it is a product of their own tampering.
