In January 2017, 91.8% of Scottish A&E patients were seen within four hours. The target, set high intentionally, is 95%. I’m not watching BBC so have no idea how they’re reporting this. In England’s A&E units, we heard in the Telegraph on the 9th of February:
‘England’s A&E units suffered the worst performance last month [January 2017] since the target was introduced 13 years ago, document suggests. Provisional data passed to the BBC says a record number of patients spent longer than the target time waiting to be seen in emergency wards during January.’
What was the actual figure, I hear you say? Well it was only 82% with more than 60 000 waiting for up to 12 hours.
Back in Scotland, Health Secretary Shona Robison said:
‘Our core A&Es have consistently out-performed those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland – and have done for the last 22 consecutive months of published statistics. Additionally, performance for the year to January 2017 is the highest since year ending January 2013. But we want to go further and continue to improve performance in Scotland. We are committed to long-term, sustainable change put in place in order to maintain high levels of performance during peaks and troughs of activity. We have put record investment and increased levels of staffing into our hospitals to achieve this – including an extra £3 million for health boards to support preparations over winter.’
Note that ‘over winter phrase’ and remember the Red Cross describing a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in NHS England in the same period…..Theresa?
http://news.gov.scot/news/ae-performance-29
You might like to see that the evidence goes back some way:
Talking-up Scotland 