Background

This section of ISD's web site presents results of the last Accident & Emergency Waiting Times Survey, conducted in April 2006, along with information from previous surveys conducted during the years 1994 to 2005.

Policy guidance in Fair to All, Personal to Each: the next steps for NHSScotland focuses on the whole patient journey through Accident & Emergency Departments and introduced a commitment that "from the end of 2007, patients will wait no longer than 4 hours between arriving at a Unit and admission, discharge or transfer; unless there are stated clinical reasons for keeping the patient in the Unit".

The Scottish Executive Centre for Change & Innovation, through its Unscheduled Care Collaborative (UCC) Programme, is working with NHSScotland to help achieve the 4-hour commitment. Input from the UCC Programme guided the revision of the survey content in 2005 to capture data consistent with the prospective 4-hour commitment and to start to identify major causes of waits and delays.

The UCC Programme requires sites to record patient-based waiting times information in a systematic and consistent way and all A&E Units were expected to be using electronic data capture systems to track performance against the 4-hour maximum wait target from June 2006.   Many Boards have introduced the Emergency Department Information System (EDIS) which has been nationally procured.  The A&E waiting times survey has been necessary historically because of the lack of a systematic data source, but its value is limited by the focus on a few days out of a year. The 2006 survey was the final one, since continuous waiting times data will be available via the IT systems. This will provide a more thorough approach to tracking waiting times performance. Development data from the IT systems is now available.

The Survey Results section contains tables showing the results of the 2006 survey and selected trend information and a link to an archive section with historically published data.

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