Combined Performance Summary January/February 2018

Today, NHS England published its Combined Performance Summary, which provides data on key performance measures for January and February of this year. Here we show some of these statistics and how they compare with previous years.

When analysing the data it is important to remember the NHS National Emergency Pressures Panel’s decision to defer all non-urgent inpatient elective care for the month of January.

For interactive charts showing the quality of health and social care over time, please refer to our indicator pages.

The Nuffield Trust has issued a statement about today's figures which can be read here.

Key points:

In February 2018, the percentage of people spending more than 4 hours in A&E from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge reached 15%. This is the worst level since data collection began.
Total A&E attendances reached 1.82 million in February 2018, which is 4.9% higher than the same month last year, but 2.7% lower than in February 2016.
Emergency admissions via A&E have been increasing year-on-year, reaching over 352,000 in February 2018.
Trolley waits have worsened, with over 68,000 patients spending more than four hours from decision to admit to admission in February 2018. This is 26.1% higher than for the same month last year, and over 3.5 times higher than it was five years ago.
Only two out of 137 major A&E departments (Type 1) met the four-hour A&E target in February 2018.
The total number of people waiting for a planned hospital admission remained at 4 million in January 2018.
The proportion of people waiting over 18 weeks for elective admission reached 11.8% in January 2018, which is the highest proportion since March 2009.
The 6 week diagnostics waiting time target has not been met since November 2013.
The total number of delayed transfer of care days was 152,300 in January 2018, which is slightly higher than for December 2017 but lower than it has been since August 2015.
Performance against the cancer waiting time target has worsened, with 18.9% of patients waiting over 62 days from an urgent GP referral to their first treatment for cancer in January 2018. This is a slight improvement on January last year, but is 4.5% higher than it was five years ago.