NHS Scotland is facing high A&E waiting times, with just under 65 per cent of patients seen within four hours – despite government targets of 95 per cent – and with thousands of patients waiting more than 12 hours for treatment. At NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde (NHSGGC), the health board which runs the QEUH, just over 6,000 patients visit A&E each week, with 71.3 per cent of these patients seen within four hours. Around 2,000 patients a month are not being recorded on A&E waiting times at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, a whistleblower said. Image Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images However, the health board does not include patients presenting to the Acute Assessment Unit (AAU) at the QEUH in its A&E figures, despite the two performing essentially the same function. Patients are generally referred to AAU for emergency assessment after first seeing their GP with their concerns, whereas A&E patients present themselves. Like A&E, the AAU sees a wide range of patients with potentially life-threatening conditions including heart attacks, pneumonia, Covid, strokes and falls. The whistleblower, a consultant physician at QEUH, said: “If you turn up at A&E, you will immediately be on target for four hours. While in our medical assessment units, none of our patients are off the clock at all – but this is not the case across Scotland. “If you look at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, which has a medical assessment unit and no A&E department, it’s all on the clock straight away. So there is no logic to it. “If you have pneumonia and you’re sitting at home in the community, if you go to QEUH A&E, then that’s fine, they put the watch on you. Whereas if you get a doctor, the GP probably won’t see you anyway, and they’ll send you straight to the hospital and you’ll come through one of the other two doors and you won’t go on the clock.” The consultant says QEUH’s AAU sees around 500 patients a week and estimates that “around 90 per cent of these patients are not seen and treated within four hours”. “I’ve seen 13 patients sleeping in the waiting room on a row of trolleys,” the informant said. “And it’s not a medical area – it’s just a waiting room. It was extremely bad. There are people who regularly sleep on trolleys.” Scottish Labour’s health spokeswoman Jackie Bailey said: “This is a shocking example of SNP cover-up and secrecy. It is clear to all that this SNP government is failing to live up to its own guidelines and is only focused on crunching the numbers. “This is not just an attempt to mislead, it can also mean patients are treated as lower priority and waiting hours on trolleys. Once again, the SNP has put saving its reputation above the health and well-being of the people of Scotland. “The true scale of the humanitarian crisis in our NHS is being deliberately concealed. Staff are demoralized and patients live in fear – we can’t go on like this. It’s time for this spin-obsessed, do-nothing health minister to understand his jokes.” The whistleblower said there was “unwritten pressure” to move people out of A&E and into beds in the QEUH, while patients in the AAU are left waiting on trolleys. “We’re not being transparent and honest about it,” the adviser said. “We need to be able to look at how big the problem is and make sure we are prioritizing patients who are sick, rather than prioritizing a group of patients coming through the A&E door instead of through another door in the hospital.” Under guidance from Public Health Scotland, NHS boards are required to report data on all emergency care attendances, whether they are provided in an A&E department, emergency department, minor trauma unit or trolley area of an assessment unit. The revelations come just days after it was reported that there were other statistical discrepancies in the government’s A&E figures. NHS Tayside consistently tops Scottish mainland health boards for A&E performance, thanks largely to the implementation of a “continuous flow” policy – which sees patients requiring admission removed from A&E as soon as they are ready, regardless of whether there are beds available in the wards. At the board’s Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, patients who would spend hours waiting on a trolley in A&E can instead spend hours waiting on a trolley elsewhere in the hospital, where the four-hour waiting time target does not apply. A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The Scottish Government expects all boards to comply with guidelines for recording waits against the four-hour A&E target, which covers attendances at all types of A&E sites, including of trolley assessment unit areas. We will be contacting all boards to make sure this is followed. “A&E departments continue to be under significant pressure and, as with healthcare systems in the UK and globally, the pandemic continues to affect services. Scotland is the only part of the UK to publish weekly A&E statistics. “Recovery will not happen overnight and we are working closely with those boards facing the greatest pressures as we enter an extremely difficult winter period.” A spokesman for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde said: “At all times NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde’s reporting procedures comply with national guidelines and agreements. To suggest otherwise would be inaccurate and misleading. “Emergency Department and Assessment Unit attendance data is submitted to the same submission file to Public Health Scotland (PHS).”
