More than a quarter of ambulances that arrived at A&E departments last week waited for over an hour to hand patients over to hospital staff.
The figures were published as Rishi Sunak admitted during a visit to a school in London this morning that the NHS was “under enormous pressure”.
On average, 2,674 ambulances a day waited for over an hour in the final week of 2022, double the peak figure from last winter. On the worst day, December 28, 30 per cent of patients spent over an hour in the back of an ambulance.
NHS 111 reported “levels of demand not seen since the start of the Covid pandemic”, answering 410,618 calls in a week, its second highest number ever. A third of calls to the service were abandoned.
Hospitals remain very full and 93 per cent of beds are occupied. There were 12,809 beds each day taken by patients who were medically fit to be discharged, about 20 per cent of total beds.
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Cases of flu and coronavirus in hospitals went up again. In the week to New Year’s Day there were 5,105 patients with flu in general and acute hospital beds, up from 3,479 the previous week. An average of 9,390 patients in hospital had coronavirus each day, up by about 1,200 on the week before.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, NHS national medical director, said: “We knew this winter would be one of the most difficult in the history of the NHS and I want to thank staff for all their hard work in caring for and treating so many patients while dealing with record demand on services, including the enormous pressure from flu and Covid.”
He said that plans announced last autumn, including dozens of specialist hubs to treat acute respiratory infection and creating community fall response services, would “help ensure we are in the best place possible to provide care for patients at this incredibly challenging time”.
He said there were hundreds of extra 111 and 999 call handlers, adding “and we��re also continuing to make good progress to put the equivalent of 7,000 extra beds in place by March”.
However, he added: “It remains vital that people make the most of services like 111 online and, as ever, only use 999 in an emergency. And it’s also crucial that those who are eligible come forward for flu and Covid vaccines as soon as possible.”
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The prime minister said: “The NHS is obviously under enormous pressure as we recover from Covid and I have enormous admiration for all the people working incredibly hard in the NHS right now to help get us through that.
“We are supporting them with billions of pounds of extra funding, but in particular this winter what we want to do is make sure we move people out of hospitals into social care, into communities — that is one of the most powerful ways we can ease some of the pressures on A&E departments and ambulances that are waiting too long.
“We need to make sure that money reaches the front line and make a difference.”
Sunak said that other initiatives were being used to tackle the problem, adding that “people should rest assured that one of my promises that I made this week was to tackle NHS waits and I’m fully committed to doing that, we’re putting the extra money in and we need to make sure that the initiatives we have put in place actually make a difference. But this is what I’m focused on.”
