Second-worst performance on record for A&E waiting times

Waiting-times performance in Scotland’s emergency departments has dropped to the second-worst on record, official figures show.

A Scottish Government target aims to have 95% of patients at A&E seen and subsequently discharged or admitted within four hours.

New official statistics show this was the case in just 69.8% of cases in the week up to February 20.

During the seven-day period, 627 of the 23,331 patients who attended at A&E waited more than 12 hours while 1,749 waited longer than eight hours.

The figure has been lower just once, when it was 67.3% in the week up to January 9 – when Scotland was still battling with the Omicron variant of Covid-19.

Meanwhile, performance in emergency departments showed a slight improvement in the whole of January.

Some 76% of patients at A&E were seen within the four-hour standard, compared to 75.7% in December and an improvement on the lowest level on record – during October – which was 73.5%.

During January, 2,266 (2.1%) of the 110,626 patients who attended emergency departments waited more than 12 hours while 6,682 (6.2%) waited more than eight hours.