Health reporter
The Liberal Democrats have set out a £1.5bn plan to give patients in England a legal right to be admitted or referred for treatment within 12 hours of arriving at A&E, to end what they have called a “deadly corridor crisis”. In a speech, party leader Sir Ed Davey called for a new legal duty to limit the time patients wait to be admitted, transferred or discharged after arriving in A&E. The Lib Dems say their plan would be funded by scrapping a UK-US pharmaceuticals deal, which could see the NHS pay billions more for drugs.
The Department of Health and Social Care said the government had invested an extra £26bn in the NHS and argued it would “take time to turn around the mess we inherited”.
The number of patients waiting more than 12 hours for admission to A&E has increased substantially since the pandemic in 2021.
The latest NHS figures, external from November show 50,648 people in England waited more than 12 hours following a decision to admit them to hospital.
There were an estimated 16,644 excess deaths associated with long A&E waits before admission in England in 2024, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, external. Sir Ed said: “This deadly corridor crisis isn’t befitting of the heroic doctors, nurses and other health professionals who work in our NHS.
