Unscheduled care covers any unplanned, urgent, and emergency care provided by healthcare services. It can cover a variety of conditions but essentially refers to care which needs to be provided quickly, or in some cases immediately. 

As part of launching that work, we’ve published a data tool and an accompanying blog. The tool compiles data from across the unscheduled care system in Wales and provides a snapshot of how the system is coping. 

View our blog.

What did we find?

The data in our new tool confirms an unscheduled care system under real pressure, with patients waiting a long time to receive an ambulance or be treated in an A&E department and high staff absence rates.

In February 2022, some of the most concerning points include:

• 58% of people attending an A&E department were seen within four hours. 75% of patients were seen within eight hours with 84% seen within 12 hours.  
• just over one in two (55%) of red calls received an ambulance within eight minutes.  
• 95% of ‘amber 1’ calls were responded to within five hours and for ‘amber 2’ calls within 12 hours, with 469 people across both categories waiting over 12 hours for a response. 
• the ambulance service lost 23,214 hours to handover delays, the highest number recorded to date. That equates to an average of 827 hours a day.