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In 2023, almost 14,000 people in England are estimated to have died due to excessive waits in emergency departments, averaging more than 260 deaths per week, according to new figures from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM). The RCEM estimate is based on a large study of NHS patients published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021, which found one excess death for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in an A&E department. Following a Freedom of Information audit of NHS trusts, the college has found that 65 per cent of people waiting 12 hours or more in A&E were patients waiting for a hospital bed. NHS data for England revealed that over 1.5 million patients waited 12 hours or more in major emergency departments last year. Based on the RCEM calculation, this indicates that over a million of those patients were waiting for a bed.

The UK government has announced plans to update legislation to enable more services and individuals to provide take-home supplies of naloxone - a life-saving opioid overdose antidote - over the next few weeks. Naloxone can immediately reverse the effects of an opioid overdose by reversing breathing difficulties. The medicine can be administered by anyone in an emergency. However, current legislation allows only drug and alcohol treatment services to supply it without a prescription to individuals for future use. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed on Tuesday (14 May) that more professionals, including nurses, paramedics, police officers, probation officers and pharmacy professionals, will be able to supply the medicine without a prescription to save lives. Health and Social Care Secretary Victoria Atkins warned that opioid addiction can ruin lives and it accounts for the largest proportion of drug-related deaths across the UK.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on Thursday (30th November) announced the launch of a new suicide surveillance system, bolstering its efforts to tackle emerging methods of suicide and clamp down on those seeking to sell dangerous products to vulnerable people. For now, the DHSC will work with the National Police Chiefs' Council to gather near to real-time data from across the country on deaths by suspected suicide by gender, age group and method. The data will be obtained from individual police forces in England and the government will get it within three months of a suspected suicide, the DHSC said in its release. Previously, the only suicide data available at a national level was provided by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), but it could take up to 2 years for the official ONS data to come through.