Over 300 people died every week while waiting for treatment in British emergency rooms in 2025, where deadly overcrowding in hospitals is said to have been normalised, with half a million people forced to wait over 24 hours in a year.
Analysis of official government data by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimates that over 1,300 people died a month in Accident & Emergency (A&E) departments last year because they were forced to wait too long for treatment. The 15,860 avoidable deaths over the course of 2025 is ten times higher than a decade earlier, and is said to be a result of British hospitals where overcrowding has been normalised.
The Royal College said the rate of avoidable deaths in A&E started to rise after a patient had been kept waiting five hours and continued to rise every hour thereafter. Incredibly, 1.74 million patients in emergency rooms in Britain were forced to wait at least 12 hours last year, and 489,000 had to wait over 24 hours.
According to the official standards Britain’s socialised healthcare service, the National Health Service, functionally all patients should be seen within four hours of arriving at A&E. The last time that happened nationwide was in 2015.
The Times of London states the main reason for extremely long A&E wait times is not the emergency room itself, but rather that the other departments in hospitals are so overcrowded they cannot admit any more patients for treatment. The inability to move arrivals onto other parts of the hospital where they should be leaves the ER itself to become a giant waiting room for grievously ill people, with many accommodated on beds in corridors.
The report cites the remarks of the president of the Royal College, Dr Ian Higginson, who said he questioned “how many more deaths it will take before we see a determined, meaningful plan to tackle this crisis.” He continued: “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 to marginally improve headline statistics, rather than on those who need our services the most.”