NHS Performs - weekly update of emergency department activity and waiting time statistics
Week ending 17 May 2020

About this release

This release by Public Health Scotland (PHS), provides a weekly update of key statistics on attendances at Accident and Emergency (A&E) services across Scotland. The information includes trends in the number of attendances and performance against the 4 hour standard.

The statistics in this weekly update cover Emergency Departments only, and include new data for the week ending 17 May 2020.

Main points

Attendances at A&E services in NHSScotland has seen a large drop since the week ending 22 March 2020, this will be due to the measures put in place to respond to COVID-19.

During week ending 17 May 2020:

• There were 16,359 attendances at A&E services in NHSScotland.
• 95.9% of attendances at A&E services were seen and resulted in a subsequent admission, transfer or discharge within 4 hours.
• 31 patients spent more than 8 hours in an A&E department.
• 7 patients spent more than 12 hours in an A&E department.

Percentage within 4 hours

Attendance

Comparison table

In this interactive table the data for Scotland and NHS Boards or the hospitals can be compared. In the table settings the location type and variables in the table can be selected and filtered by locations, years and months.

Background

Patients attending Emergency Departments are first triaged to assess the seriousness of their condition. Depending on the patient’s condition, diagnostic tests may be carried out, and treatments given within the Emergency Department, before the patient is admitted to hospital, directed to another service or discharged home. There are 91 locations providing A&E services across Scotland. Of these, 30 are classed as Emergency Departments - larger A&E services that typically provide a 24 hour consultant led service. The 30 Emergency Departments are responsible for more than 8 out of every 10 A&E attendances, 19 out of 20 breaches of the four hour standard, and 19 out of 20 admissions from A&E to hospital.

A National Statistics publication on A&E Activity and Waiting Times is released on the first Tuesday of every month. The statistics in the monthly publication cover attendances to all A&E services in Scotland and are derived from the A&E datamart which includes more detailed information. These statistics are subject to a higher level of quality assurance than the weekly statistics; however, there is good agreement between the two data sources. A comparison can be found online at Emergency Care - Statistics (external website).

Since 2007, the national standard for A&E is that new and unplanned return attendances at an A&E service should be seen and then admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours. This standard applies to all areas of emergency care, including attendances in trolleyed areas of an Assessment Unit as well as Emergency Departments and minor injury units.

A list of sites providing emergency care and their classification can be found online at Emergency Care - Hospital Site List (external website). For information on how the Scottish Government (SG) monitors NHS Boards' performance within A&E Services, please see the NHS Local Delivery Plan standards (external website).

Further information

Further information can be found on the Emergency Care (external website) pages. 

NHS Performs

A selection of information from this publication is included in NHS Performs (external website) which is a website that brings together a range of information on how hospitals and NHS Boards within NHSScotland are performing.