Nick Triggle, the only one unwilling to accept my correction of his inaccurate A&E figures [Guardian, Independent and Ch 4 do] reports in broadcasts all day today:
‘Similar pressures are being seen in other parts of the UK, but because of the way figures are collected direct comparisons cannot be made.’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51565492
I can’t speak for Wales or N Ireland but, if he refers to NHS Scotland, he’s wrong. How do I know? See these:
Seen within 4 hours Waiting more than 12 hours
England 12 785 247, 76.9% 324 572, 2%
Scotland 1 252 051, 89.9% 2 360, 0.2%
Wales 620 608, 75.2% 45 757, 5.5%
N Ireland 434 468, 64.7% 25 132, 3.7%
NHS Scotland is doing far better and you can be damn sure that if there was any evidence of large numbers of the ‘sickest’ patients waiting on trolleys for hours, BBC Scotland and their opposition party feeders would let us know.
Footnote: On Triggle’s refusal to count A&E properly:
So, even as they stand, NHS Scotland’s figures are far superior. Perhaps most shocking, is the fact that you were 27 times more likely to have to wait more than 12 hours in a Welsh A&E department. You were only 10 times more likely to have done so in England and, at first glance, the 4-hour waiting time performance does not see that much worse but it’s a lie and for two reasons.
First the figure above for 4 hour waits in NHS England is based on all 3 types of department including small units dealing with only non-life-threatening ‘elastoplast’ injuries which typically can hit nearly 100% treatment within 4 hours and thus be used to massage the overall results. Only NHS England gathers this data. English Type 1 full emergency departments, comparable to those in the rest of the UK have much worse performance.
Sneakily NHS England have released separate attendance figures for all types but for performance have combined them to hide the awful truth. But, I have worked out the average for the last 12 months. It’s 76.9%, only just better than that for Wales and way behind that of Scotland
Second, NHS England starts the clock again after patients are admitted while NHS Scotland counts from arrival in A&E, so the gap is probably even bigger.
https://inews.co.uk/news/health/nhs-england-covering-up-true-scale-of-12-hour-hospital-waits-1335856
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
Back in January 2020 when the A&E figures for November 2019 were released the usual suspects went big on the number of people waiting more than 12 hours. The BBC even managed to roll out a member from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine to say that those numbers would suggest that people would be waiting on trolleys. Not a shred of evidence was produced to show that anyone had waited any length of time on a trolley. As you well know if any patient had waited on a trolley in A&E in November 2019 the MSM would have been all over it.
Here is the BBC report
Record numbers wait more than 12 hours in Scottish A&Es – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-51022054
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And today in the Guardian on NHS England
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/26/corridor-nursing-becoming-norm-in-packed-aes-warn-medics
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So Nick Triggle tells us that “… because of the way figures are collected direct comparisons cannot be made.’
Really? That is not what another part of the BBC tells us: “The way the A&E target is measured is almost identical. In each case services across the UK are given four hours in which to treat and discharge or admit or transfer a patient.”
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-41483322
So why is this Health Correspondent producing such misinformation? Not what we should expect from a public service broadcaster.
As has been pointed out in Talking Up Scotland repeatedly, there is an almost exactly comparable performance statistic available in the public domain viz. ‘Type 1’ A&E sites in NHS England and ‘Main’ sites in NHS Scotland. The BBC seems just to refuse to acknowledge this in its reporting. And of course it is these Type 1 and Main A&E facilities that most (all) of the public would recognise as actual ‘A&E’!
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