More than 1,300 patients a month in England are dying needlessly due to long A&E waits, a tenfold rise in a decade, figures suggest.
There were more than 300 deaths linked to long waits every week in 2025, up from 30 a week in 2015, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
The RCEM’s president, Dr Ian Higginson, said he wondered how many more deaths it would take before there was a meaningful plan to tackle the crisis.
“We have to ask why this awful problem isn’t the subject of relentless focus and political conversation. The number of deaths linked to long stays in our emergency departments explicitly show the system is failing the patients it is meant to be caring for,” he said.
For its excess death estimates, the RCEM used a study of more than 5 million NHS patients published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021. This found there was one excess death for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in A&E before being found a bed. The risk of death started to increase after five hours and got worse with longer waiting times.
Using this method, the RCEM estimated there were 15,860 excess deaths in 2025 related to long waits. The figure was down slightly on 2024 (16,644) but up nearly tenfold on 2015 (1,657).
Higginson said: “As an emergency doctor, it’s heartbreaking that patients arrive to our emergency departments in their time of need, and we can’t do our jobs properly because we are full. To make things worse we are being asked to focus on the least sick patients to try and marginally improve headline statistics, rather than on those who need our services the most.
“It’s frustrating that we continue to see a lack of solutions designed to tackle the root causes of the problem. Instead, we are fobbed off with recycled ideas that haven’t ever worked, performance data that doesn’t reflect reality, and a focus on perceived ‘quick fixes’.”
He added: “Whilst we welcome the government’s stated commitment to eliminate corridor care, until we prioritise patients who experience long waits for admission, we will not get to the bottom of the whole issue.”
In the meantime, Higginson said, A&Es in England would remain in constant distress and patients would continue to die unnecessarily.
Prof Nicola Ranger, the general secretary and chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, said the death toll was a catastrophe that had gone unchecked in hospitals for far too long.
“To bring this to an end, we need system-wide, long-term, sustainable solutions. This must include urgent investment in hospital beds and the nursing workforce, while also improving access to primary care, investing in community nursing and unlocking capacity in social care,” she said.
Every day without action was a failure that had “devastating consequences” for patients, she added.
Dr Vicky Price, the president of the Society for Acute Medicine, said the deaths were a source of “national shame” and the problem of overcrowding in A&Es was getting worse.
The Department of Health and Social Care said it was unacceptable for patients to face long waits for emergency care, and its thoughts were with those who had lost loved ones.
A spokesperson added: “While A&E waiting times are at their lowest level in half a decade, we know there is more to do. That is why we are investing over £215m in 40 new and expanded same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres across England to reduce pressure on A&E.”
They said the government was also deploying specialist teams to NHS trusts with the worst levels of corridor care in an effort to eradicate it.
