There are many complex reasons for why your hospital is not meeting this 4 hour waiting time. However there is a reoccurring theme, only around 1 in 5 people (20%) of people who visit A&E departments need to be admitted to hospital.
There were 22.9 million attendances at A&E in England last year (2015/16)—a record number. That was 1.5 million more than in 2010/11 and around 4.2 million more than in 2005/06.
Often people do not know where to go or how to access advice in an emergency and therefore increasing numbers of people are coming to A&E departments.
The NHS asks people to CHOOSE WELL (click on the link for more info).
The A&E 'waiting time' is the time it takes after someone arrives in A&E for them to be either admitted to hospital, transferred to another healthcare provider (maybe to social services or to another hospital) or discharged. Therefore it represents the total time someone spends in an A&E department.
Since June 2015, the NHS Constitution in England, pledges a maximum 4 hour 'waiting time' for 95% of patients attending A&E departments. Whilst such a pledge is not legally binding, it represents a commitment by the NHS to provide high quality services.
The data below represents the performance against this pledge.
All NHS Trusts with emergency departments in London are in this map. Trusts may have more than 1 site. We currently only have mapped data for London.
This is a hack from Over The Air 2016 by Paul Johnston and Sarah Zareian
Data from NHS England: A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2016-17