The NHS has experienced the busiest summer ever for accident and emergency (A&E) departments in England, new figures reveal, with NHS staff managing 6.8 million attendances in three months.
As the NHS prepares for what is expected to be a challenging winter period, the latest performance data shows there was record demand at A&Es in June, July and August combined, with 6,776,150 attendances – up 240,776 on the same period last year.
While there is huge pressure on services and patients are often waiting too long for care, there has been some progress in a number of areas, with faster ambulance response times, fewer long waits for treatment and more people receiving the all-clear or a definitive cancer diagnosis within a month.
Emergency A&E admissions rose to 525,633 in August from 523,881 a year earlier – showing staff are dealing with growing numbers of unwell patients who need to be admitted to hospital.
Despite increasing pressure, dedicated NHS staff admitted, transferred or discharged more than three quarters (76.3%) of patients within four hours in A&E in August – an increase of 3.3 percentage points from August 2023 and the highest since August 2021.
The overall covid backlog for elective care remained at 7.62 million in July but waits of over a year dropped to 290,326 – the lowest since December 2020. It is the lowest proportion of people waiting over a year (3.8%) since October 2020.
Ambulance services responded to 730,669 incidents last month, up 22,708 in a year. Of these, 73,630 were the most serious Category 1 calls, which is 28% higher than pre-pandemic (57,598 in August 2019).
Response times for Category 1 incidents are still longer than the seven-minute national standard but are slightly quicker than August last year – dropping to an average of 8 minutes 3 seconds, from 8 minutes 17 seconds. Category 2 response fell by 6 minutes in a month, to 27 minutes 25 seconds – and down from 31 minutes 30 seconds in August 2023.
The data shows that the NHS has met the faster cancer diagnosis standard for the third month in a row with more than three quarters of people getting the all-clear or a definitive diagnosis within four weeks. More people than ever before were seen within the standard with over 220,000 (221,572) getting all clear or a diagnosis within 28 days.
The figures also show that July was the busiest month on record for cancer referrals with 286,720 urgent referrals seen in just one month.
While more needs to be done to ensure that patients receive timely cancer treatment with continued challenges meeting the 62 day standard, there were 58,875 cancer treatments carried out by staff in July – a 15% increase compared to the same month last year and the highest number on record.
NHS staff also delivered a record number of diagnostic tests (2,485,752) – up 11% from 2,229,459 in July 2023 and 20% on 2,064,497 pre-pandemic (July 2019)
Bed capacity remains under pressure in hospitals across the country with an average of 12,092 patients a day spending more time in hospital than clinically needed.
Services faced industrial action by junior doctors at the start of this period (Thursday 27 June to Tuesday 2 July) with 61,989 acute appointments needing to be rescheduled across the action, bringing the total cumulative impact on appointments since strikes first began to nearly 1.5 million.
The NHS has started vaccinating people against RSV, flu and covid to protect people from seasonal viruses ahead of winter. It is hoped that the vaccination campaigns will help avoid a “tripledemic” of RSV, covid and flu colliding during an already busy time for frontline staff.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS National Medical Director said: “The NHS has just come out of the busiest summer on record for A&Es across the country, and preparations are already underway for what is expected to be an extremely difficult winter with significant strain on urgent and emergency care.
“NHS staff are preparing for additional pressure over the winter, but we are concerned about seasonal viruses and a potential 'tripledemic' putting extra strain on already very busy services. Vaccination is crucial to preparation, with the first ever campaign for RSV already underway alongside covid and flu jab rollouts for those most at risk of serious illness.
“We are hugely grateful to NHS staff for their continuing efforts, and important improvements have been made in ambulance response times, long waits for treatment and cancer diagnosis. But it is clear, as evidenced in Lord Darzi review, that waits across a range of services remain unacceptable and there is much more to do to deliver more timely care for those who need it.
“We are committed to working with the government to create a 10-year plan for the NHS that includes a clear plan to bring waits for patients down.”
