The Royal College of Emergency Medicine research report on long waits and excess deaths, in February 2023, missed my eyes and those of all MSM reporters in Scotland it seems.
Did the researchers for Lisa Summers tell her about this?
I’m grateful to reader Robert for alerting us to this shocking data.
From the RCEM release:
Emergency care services face an unparalleled crisis. More patients than ever before are experiencing extremely long waiting times in our Emergency Departments (EDs), associated with patient harm and excess deaths.
https://rcem.ac.uk/data-show-1-65-million-patients-in-england-faced-12-hour-waits-from-time-of-arrival-in-aes-in-2022/#:~:text=A%20new%20briefing%20by%20the,arrival%20in%20an%20Emergency%20Department.
The RCEM has no interest in comparisons across the four nations but we do, as part of our ongoing compensation for the overwhelmingly negative, by Scottish MSM, reporting of public services performance, in a proxy war against the SNP Government.
Regulars will know what follows.
England has 10 times the population of Scotland so, all things being equal, might be expected to have 10 times the estimated 765 excess deaths in Scotland, 7650, due to long waits in A&E but has 23 003, three times as many pro rata.
Had NHS Scotland been run by NHS England and the Conservative Government, another 1 500 roughly, might have died.
You can see from the table above that Labour run Wales and Northern Ireland, with smaller populations, have even worse figures.
Talking-up Scotland 
So, in essence, these figures show us that England and Scotland have a seasonal problem and Wales and Northern Ireland have an endemic problem. It does not separate the two categories of excess wait and excess death. Where is this information available?
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At the link
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Rhetorical question
I wonder why December in Scotland was so bad compared with other months?
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These revealing statistics were covered in a lengthy article published here on TuS in March. I draw attention to this as it gives more detail on key statistical sources plus some context for the RCEM’s analysis. Therefore it may be helpful in providing James Gillies (above) with at least some of the information sources he seeks.
TuS article: ‘Excess deaths due to long A&E waits almost three times more common in England than in Scotland
– long A&E waits and excess deaths – Royal College reveals remarkable, unreported differences across UK!’.
See https://talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2023/03/13/excess-deaths-due-to-long-ambulance-waits-almost-three-times-more-common-in-england-than-in-scotland/
It is only recently been possible monthly to compare and contrast > 12 hour waits in major A&E departments in the NHS across the UK on a like for like basis. The RCEM finally convinced the UK Department of Health and NHS England to ditch what the RCEM president told a House of Lord committee recently was a ‘dishonest’ metric viz. publishing stats on 12 hour waits measured from ‘decision to admit’ rather than from ‘arrival’. This brings NHS England into line with the other national NHS systems.
Unfortunately, we still have the BBC reporting A&E performance metrics for NHS England on the basis of ALL A&E departments. There are always significant differences between for example the 4 hour waiting time performance metric for ALL A&E departments in NHS England and the equivalent figure for just the major (Type 1) departments.
The consequence of this is that, as an example, the general public – and including the users of BBC output – never got to know that in December 2022: ‘Four-hour performance at major Emergency Departments was 49.6%, this is the worst four-hour performance on record. This is a 4.9 percentage point decrease from the previous month, and 11.6 percentage point decrease from December 2021 (61.2%).’ (quoted from an RCEM press release)
By contrast, in Scotland the BBC reports the metrics for the MAIN A&E departments and rarely provides a valid comparative analysis with the other national NHS systems. The RCEM when commenting on NHS England’s A&E performance – and in contrast with the BBC – ALWAYS focuses on Type 1 departments, the equivalent of the ‘main’ departments in Scotland.
On 9 October 2018 The BBC News website published this: ‘Reality Check: Is Scottish A&E outperforming England?’ A rare event!
It concluded on the 4 hour waits metric: ‘Looking at this measure, the last time England had better four-hour A&E waiting times (than Scotland) was in February 2015 – three and a half years ago.’ As the graph in the article shows, the difference in performance is typically 10-15 percentage points. Similar differences persist today, with NHS Scotland’s better – albeit still poorer than it should be – performance largely unreported by the corporate media and the BBC.
And significantly the Fact Check article noted: ‘NHS Digital says the best comparison to make is between Type 1, major A&E facilities in England (in order to exclude things like walk-in centres and minor injury units) and emergency departments in Scotland.’ So why does the BBC ignore this advice?
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They were!
I’d forgotten.
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