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​Last month the NHS experienced it's busiest month on record yet, hitting an all-time high number of ambulance call outs and A&E attendances.

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On average one in five people who had attended an A&E unit in the last month, had to wait more than four hours which is well over the target time aimed for the by the government.
Above all this, more than 2,000 people were forced to wait up to 12 hours for a hospital bed, a massive difference from the 284 total amount in December 2018.

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All of this is represented in the NHS monthly performance figures that show attendances at A&E during 2019 went up 4.8% since 2018, with an extreme high of 1.2million more attendances and in total has risen 14.2% within the span of the last 3 years according to NHS England.
Overall there were a total of 2,181,024 A&E attendances in December alone, a 6.5% rise from the same time last year which is an extra 4,307 attendances per day, another all time high.

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Ambulance attended incidents in December were 790,294 in total, being a 5.3% increase from the same time last year and the busiest month on record so far.
Close to 10,000 of these call-outs were for life-threatening cases and that's a 16.6% rise from last year.

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Professor Stephen Powis, NHS England Medical Director, said “A&E’s across the country are very busy, in 2019 we treated over a million more patients in our A&E’s than the previous year. We have got more hospital beds open than last winter, but flu has come early and is twice as high than last year”.

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It was announced earlier in the year that the NHS would be releasing their biggest flu campaign yet, in which over 30 million people would be offered a flu shot.

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To find about more about the NHS 2019 Winter report, click here.

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