What’s happening?
The annual winter crisis started months early and has turned into an emergency, with A&Es swamped and lives being lost. Over the past year, the proportion of patients who wait more than 12 hours in A&E to be admitted to a ward has risen from 2% to 7%. According to analysis by The Economist, it’s likely that around 260 people a week died between August and November 2022 (a total of 3,400 deaths) as a result of these delays, compared with the shorter waiting times recorded in 2019. That constitutes a quarter of the excess deaths
