A&E Departments Improve, But Still Miss Waiting-Times Target

21 March 2017, 13:55

Performance in Scotland's accident-and-emergency (A&E) departments has improved slightly but is still falling below a key waiting-times target.

The latest figures show that 26,087 people attended A&E in the week ending March 12, of which 92.2% were seen and either admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours.

The figure is up from 90.7% in the previous week but unchanged from the week ending March 13 last year.

The Scottish Government target is for 95% of cases to be dealt with in four hours but the benchmark has not been met in any single week since September.

Eight health boards missed the target in the latest week, with NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde recording the poorest performance at 87.7%, followed by NHS Lanarkshire at 89.7%.

Scotland's newest hospital, the £842 million Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, again had the lowest compliance of any individual site.

At its A&E unit, 79.4% of patients were seen within the required time, up from 75.7% in the previous week.

The two other sites with the poorest performance were Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride (85.5%) and Royal Alexandra Hospital in Paisley (86.7%).

Health Secretary Shona Robison said: ''While waiting times fluctuate throughout the year, it's welcome that A&E performance has improved this week thanks to the efforts of NHS staff.

''For 23 consecutive months, Scotland's core A&Es been the best-performing in the UK, over 13 percentage points better than England on the latest statistics - that's the largest gap in the six-and-half years data has been available.''