Acute sector

The secondary care acute sector comprises of acute, specialist acute and combined trusts delivering urgent and emergency care, planned care and specialised care for different conditions such as rare cancers, genetic disorders or complex medical or surgical conditions. It isn’t possible to cover the data associated with all acute pathways here. For the purposes of this summary, we explore the trends across A&E services, diagnostics, the elective care waiting list and cancer services. We also look at data relating to current levels of NHS capacity such as general and acute beds and metrics of patient flow.

Demand and Activity

Demand for urgent and emergency care has been extremely high and therefore activity has followed suit. This has been the busiest year ever, with the first six months of the year seeing record highs for each month in terms of A&E attendances. June recorded 2.3 million A&E attendances. This is 3.3% more than June 2023 and 8.8% greater than five years ago in June 2019, before the pandemic. Similarly, emergency admissions also recorded the busiest June on record with nearly 537,000 emergency admissions, 1.5% higher than five years ago.