Emergency care plan doesn’t just lack ambition, it tries to tackle the wrong causes of the problem

The emergency care plan’s lack of ambition should be clear.1 In each of the last three years more than 1.7 million patients took longer than 12 hours to leave emergency departments (by admission to a bed or by being discharged home).2 That is about 10% of attendance,2 and the plan has set that as a target. Those long waits cause notably higher mortality, but the plan doesn’t seem to even have an ambition to reduce deaths by much.