Northern Ireland’s emergency departments are in the worst state on record, with doctors warning more patients will die unless Stormont acts immediately to tackle the crisis.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) has today (Thursday) issued an urgent appeal to the Executive after new official figures for January to March 2026 exposed the scale of the pressures facing A&Es.
Almost a quarter of all major emergency department patients – 23.5%, or an average of 12,309 people a month – waited more than 12 hours to be discharged, admitted or transferred. Ten years ago, just 1% of patients faced waits that long.
At the same time, fewer than a third (30.5%) were dealt with within the target of four hours, making this the worst quarter on record for both four‑hour and 12‑hour performance in Northern Ireland’s EDs.
Worse still, a staggering 1,280 patients waited more than two and a half days on trolleys or in cubicles over the three‑month period. In January alone, 449 patients who needed to be admitted spent more than three days stuck in the emergency department.
The median wait for those who eventually got a hospital bed was around 16 hours – again, the highest ever recorded for any quarter.
Dr Sara McGurk, RCEM Northern Ireland Vice Chair, described the situation as “utterly horrifying”.
“These figures show the true scale of the crisis our Emergency Departments have been grappling with over winter,” she said.
“It’s chaos in our departments. We have patients lining corridors facing waits for beds which can be measured in days.
“These patients are being put at risk of deterioration, or even death, by this overcrowding of departments.
“Meanwhile, the patients who can pass through, or be discharged from, our departments within four hours are now firmly in the minority.
“It is becoming difficult to even perform the basics of emergency care with overcrowding as bad as it is.
“Things are dire and, as the data shows, the worst they have ever been.”
Today’s analysis follows RCEM’s recent State of Emergency Care in Northern Ireland report, which estimated that 1,032 excess deaths last year could be linked to long waits for admission from emergency departments.
Dr McGurk said frontline staff were “working themselves to the bone just keeping this system afloat”, but warned that without urgent political and health service leadership “the cracks will continue to grow”.
She insisted the situation is “fixable” if ministers focus on proven measures to speed up the flow of patients through hospitals.
“This is a fixable problem – and we need policymakers to focus on the interventions we know work: speeding up discharge from the ‘back door’ of hospitals and freeing up beds,” she said.
“If this is not done, this permacrisis will not end any time soon and more grim milestones will be crossed.”
The RCEM is calling on the Executive to treat emergency care as a top‑tier priority, warning that every delay in action risks yet more avoidable harm and deaths.
