Dear Ed,

Improvements to waiting times statistics

Thank you for your letter of 8 July 2022. Our apologies for the delay in sending a formal response, as you know we have kept in regular contact with your team, on an informal basis, to keep them apprised of progress and developments.

You will have seen from recent press coverage that NHSE has now launched the UEC recovery plan (NHS England » Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services) which was developed as a result of extensive collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders.

The plan in addition to outlining ambitions to improve the mean response time for category 2 ambulance calls and 4-hour performance for A&E recognises the importance of monitoring the longest waits in A&E. To this end the 12 hours from arrival measure will, from April, be published on a monthly basis, it had previously been part of the annual A&E HES publication.

In addition to increasing transparency, the more frequent publication of data on the12 hour measure will allow greater comparability between the home countries and we believe both these aspects will be welcomed by users.

We’re copying this letter to policy colleagues here and our CE’s office.

Yours sincerely,

Chris Roebuck, Mark Svenson

Joint Heads of Profession for Statistics
NHS England