Key Highlights
- But many are becoming swamped with patients whose health concerns should be dealt with elsewhere, including a near tenfold increase in people seeking help for a cough. A&E attendances for hiccups, dizziness and a myriad of other minor conditions have also soared.
- The trend of patients heading to emergency departments with non-emergency symptoms is underlined by the fact that doctors found nothing wrong with more than 2 million A&E patients in 2024-25. It comes as Wes Streeting, the health secretary, faces pressure to show he is making progress after a year and a half in charge of the NHS.
- Last month Prof Kamila Hawthorne, Britain’s most senior GP, told the Guardian that surgeries wanted to hire more doctors to meet demand for primary care but could not afford to do so because of a lack of core funding. As people continue to be urged to stay at home over the new year period if they have symptoms of flu or Covid, analysis of NHS data by the PA Media news agency found more patients were turning to A&E for minor conditions. In the last five years, doctors saw almost 1.9m cases of people seeking help for a headache.
- Almost 1.4m A&E attendances in England from 2020-21 to 2024-25 were for a cough and 1.2m were for a sore throat. One million A&E attendances were due to earache, according to the analysis.
- There were almost 69,000 A&E attendances for a blocked nose, 4,200 for hiccups and 290,000 cases of constipation. The figures show how A&E attendances for some medical emergencies have stayed relatively consistent during and since the pandemic.
