Channel 4 News shared a special report on Wednesday 25 October on how A&Es are coming under increasing pressure from mental health patients – who are twice as likely to spend over 12 hours in the department.

This followed us recently welcoming Victoria Macdonald, Health and Social Care Editor, into our A&E at King George Hospital (KGH), to see the scale of the issue which our Chief Executive, Matthew Trainer, has raised in his Board reports for over a year.

The average length of time patients with mental health needs are spending in our department is more than a day. In September, we had 346 patients, 62 of whom (up from 41 in August) waited more than 36 hours to move to a service better equipped to look after them.

Matthew Trainer, our Chief Executive, told Victoria (above): “We’re dealing with something we’ve never seen before, in terms of the volume of these people coming into ED asking for help.

“It’s our job to try to offer them compassionate, safe, effective care when they’re here. It’s becoming increasingly hard to do this when the service is under so much strain.”

Matthew explained there were many reasons behind it, including the cost-of-living crisis. While the largest affected groups we’re seeing is women and children aged 10 to 19, followed by women from 20 to 29, we’re also seeing extremely long waits for looked after children awaiting social care placements.

Victoria said: “The fact that this hospital was willing for us to come in and film and talk to them about the problem just shows how concerned they are.

“What has also become obvious from some of the freedom of information requests we’ve made is that this is a nationwide problem. Emergency departments are filling up with mental health patients who need to be somewhere else.”

Emer Szczygiel, our Lead Nurse for Emergency Care (above), spoke about the impact it has on the rest of the department, and other patients: “It has a knock-on effect on our abilty to offload ambulances.

“We should turn our cubicles around within four hours, but when we have patients here for six, seven, eight, nine, ten, days, they’re in the cubicle for that amount of time.”

Channel 4 also interviewed Paul Calaminus, Chief Executive, NELFT. We are working closely with Paul and his colleagues, and other partners, to tackle it.

NELFT is opening 10 additional mental health treatment beds and two beds for patients with learning disabilities. They are also running pilots where they’re placing mental health practitioners in our A&Es to see if patients can be diverted away from us, as they arrive, to a service that is more appropriate to their needs.

Paul told Channel 4 News they had seen a increase in people asking for help, families no longer being able to cope, and were seeing more and more patients who had not experienced mental health issues before.

Figures Channel 4 obtained from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine showed waits of three to four days in A&Es were common, and it was not unusual for them to go over a week. We recently had a 14-year-old child who spent 28 days in our A&E.

In Janury to July this year, almost 40,000 mental health patients waited over 12 hours in A&E, over one in five.

You can watch the full report on the Channel 4 News website.