In this section we summarise NHSE's urgent and emergency care winter sitreps over the 2024/25 winter period. We define winter as the 14-week period inclusive of the first day of December until the final day in February. For the 2024/25 winter period, this covers the period from Monday 25 November until Sunday 2 March.
This analysis considers daily and weekly averages across the winter period. It highlights the peaks and troughs throughout 2024/25 and compares them to previous winter periods.
Key points
- Over 1.27 million patients arrived by ambulance this winter. This is a weekly average of nearly 91,000 patients, or a full Wembley stadium per week.
- There were only 10 days this winter when bed occupancy was lower than 92% and seven of these occurred over the Christmas period.
- On average this winter, 1 in 7 beds were occupied by patients medically fit for discharge.
- This winter, there were only two days when the number of hospital beds occupied by flu patients fell below 1,000, compared to 28 days last winter.
Urgent and emergency care
- This winter, patients were diverted to other A&E departments 471 times due to a lack of capacity, which is almost 50% higher than last winter and more than double the number seen in the winter of 2022/23.
- Over 1.27 million patients arrived by ambulance this winter. This results in a weekly average of 90,915 patients, the equivalent of a full Wembley stadium arriving by ambulance to hospitals across England each week.
- There has been a 1.1% increase in ambulance arrivals compared to last year, representing 14,200 more patients arriving by ambulance over the whole winter period.
- This winter, there were 386,420 hours lost to ambulance handover delays, a 12.8% increase from last winter.
- The first week of 2025 saw over 49,000 hours lost to handover delays, the second highest week on record since the Christmas period over the winter of 2022-23.
Figure 12
Cumulative number of arrivals by ambulance over winter
Delayed discharges
- On average, nearly 13,000 hospital beds per day were occupied by patients medically fit for discharge, equating to 90,500 bed days lost per week, or 1.27m bed days lost throughout winter. These figures are broadly in line with last year, showing that capacity and patient flow remain a problem that shows no signs of improvement.
- On average this winter, 1 in 7 beds were occupied by patients medically fit for discharge.
- 57.4% of patients who were medically fit to be discharged at some point this winter remained in hospital longer than they needed to, an increase from 55.8% last winter.
- The number of patients staying in hospital for long periods also increased over winter. The last week of winter saw an average of 19,180 patients staying in hospital for over 21 days, an 8.1% increase from the first week of winter when there were on average 17,750 patients who had stayed for longer than 21 days.
Bed occupancy and winter illnesses
- There were only 10 days this winter when bed occupancy was lower than 92% – despite recognition this is the level needed to allow for adequate patient flow. Seven of these days occurred over the week covering Christmas. This follows a similar pattern to last winter, when there were only 11 days with less than 92% If bed occupancy.
- This winter, there were only two days when the number of hospital beds occupied by flu patients fell below 1,000. In comparison, last year's winter (2023/24) saw 28 days with fewer than 1,000 hospital beds occupied by flu patients, highlighting the significant increase in the impact flu had this season.
- Norovirus had a greater impact on hospital capacity this winter.100,080 bed days were lost to norovirus throughout winter, 68% more than last year. On average, 1,021 beds were closed each day throughout winter. That's an extra 400 beds closed to norovirus each day compared to last winter.
- For 63 days this winter there were over 750 patients in hospital with norovirus, last year this happened on only 11 days.
Figure 13
Average daily number of general and acute beds occupied by flu patients
To interact with our winter analysis and make comparisons with the latest data to previous years, please view our winter watch dashboard. [add link to dashboard page]