The issue of people who are well enough to leave being stranded in hospital wards and occupying increasingly scarce inpatient beds must be addressed if Emergency Care in Scotland is to improve.
That’s the response of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Scotland as new data reveals that May 2025 was the second worst May on record for so called ‘delayed discharges’.
Published today (1 July 2025) the figures from Public Health Scotland, which detail A&E performance, show a daily average of 1,852 beds were occupied by people who were considered to no longer need inpatient care – the second highest for any May since guideline changes in 2016.
And when compared to the previous month (April 2025) – it’s an improvement of just two beds.
If patients cannot be discharged, this affects the flow of people through the hospital – and people end up stranded in A&E, often waiting extreme hours on a trolley in a corridor, for a ward bed to become available.
Covering May 2025, the figures reveal that:
- 125,779 people visited a major A&E Department (Type 1) in Scotland. A 6.7% increase compared to April.
- Of these, one in three patients (40,261) waited four hours or more to be treated, admitted or discharged (32%).
- Meanwhile, just fewer than one in 10 patients (12,672) waited eight hours or more in major EDs – the second highest number for the month of May.
- And 4,863 patients waited 12 hours or more – the equivalent to one in every 26 patients. Which is a slight improvement on the previous month when 5,139 patients endured this wait.
The figures come just a week after Public Health Scotland released data revealing there were 720,119 days spent in hospital by people whose discharge was delayed during the year 2024/5 – the highest annual figure reported since guidelines changed in 2016.
Of the total number of delayed discharge bed days, 73% were due to health and social care and patient and family related reasons (522,599).
Vice President of RCEM Scotland, Dr Fiona Hunter, said: “Yet again, the evidence to address delayed discharges continues to mount.
“As I’ve said before, and I will say it again, the situation at our hospitals’ ‘backdoor’, where we unable to discharge people, is deeply concerning and distressing for both patients and the workforce.
“Patients when they are well enough to leave want to do just that – leave, to continue their recovery. But often they can’t because of a lack of social care.
“Meanwhile in A&E, seriously unwell people are left waiting for that elusive ward bed to become available, watching the clock tick by and counting the hours they have spent on a trolley in a corridor.
“This is the reality for thousands of patients every month, while Emergency Medicine clinicians try their best to treat patients in areas that weren’t designed to deliver care in. And it’s not just an issue confined to the winter months – it’s year-round.
“So it is hard to celebrate slight improvements in extreme waiting times when every day my colleagues are struggling to admit vulnerable patients that need further care.
“Until available inpatient bed numbers increase the crisis in our EDs will continue.”
Graphic visualisations of the data compiled by RCEM can be found here.
