A Kent hospital has recorded more than 1,000 occasions in a single month when patients waited in A&E for more than 12 hours – which hospital managers have linked to increased deaths.
There were 1,315 12-hour A&E waits at Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham in May 2026, a 5% rise from April and the highest number of 12-hour waits since January.
Hospital managers have linked increased deaths to A&E delays, frailty care and prolonged waits in emergency care.
Siobhan Callanan, the trust’s interim chief executive, said: “We remain focused on reducing long waits and delivering the standard of care our patients deserve.”
At a recent hospital trust board meeting senior staff were told escalation areas, such as corridors, continued to affect patient privacy, dignity, experience and staff wellbeing.
In May there were 963 occasions when a patient spent more than 45 minutes in an emergency department corridor, compared with 929 in April.
In a recent report the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said the estimated number of deaths linked to long waits in emergency departments across England had surged almost tenfold over the past decade, external.
Dr Ian Higginson, president of the RCEM, said the number of deaths linked to long stays in A&E were “shocking” and “explicitly show the system is failing the patients it is meant to be caring for”.