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Accident and Emergency Departments: Standards

Volume 503: debated on Wednesday 6 January 2010

To ask the Secretary of State for Health what the average waiting time in accident and emergency departments in hospitals in (a) England and (b) Milton Keynes was in each year since 1997. (308087)

Information on waiting times in accident and emergency (A and E) facilities is collected by the Department for its Quarterly Monitoring of A and E (QMAE) dataset. Trusts do not submit information on average waiting times, but they do submit information on time spent from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge in hourly time bands. This information for (a) type 1 (major) A and E departments in England and (b) Milton Keynes General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust have been placed in the Library. Data have been provided from quarter 3 2002-03 onwards, as this is the first quarter in which QMAE data based on full data returns were published.

An alternative source of information on time spent within A and E departments is available from the A and E Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) data, which are collected and published by the NHS Information Centre for Health and Social Care.

A and E HES data indicate that the median time spent between arrival and departure in all types of A and E departments in England in 2007-08 was 112 minutes. A and E HES data are only available for 2007-08 and are not available for Milton Keynes General Hospital NHS Foundation Trust individually. 2007-08 A and E HES data cannot be reliably split by type of A and E, therefore the reported median waiting time figure is for all types of A and E.