A patient “gave up” and walked out of the Emergency Department at Craigavon Area Hospital after waiting 26 hours to see a doctor without success.
And “we are not outliers” was the Health Minister’s response to learning about the patient’s agonising day-plus wait.
During a meeting of the Executive to address the Winter Preparedness Plan for 2025-26, MLA for Newry and Armagh Justin McNulty raised with the Minister Mike Nesbitt that a constituent had contacted his office the week prior “distressed enormously” by a lengthy wait in an “overcrowded” emergency department.
The constituent had attended Craigavon Area Hospital where Mr McNulty told the Minister “corridor care is the norm”.
Said the MLA: “16 hours to see a doctor. After 26 hours she walked out. She just couldn’t wait anymore.
“What does it say about our health service where a woman decides to leave an ED because she’s given up?”
While the Health Minister said he was “sorry to hear it” and acknowledged it is “probably not a unique experience within our Type 1 Departments, he added in reply: “But I would simply say to the member we can go across the water and we can see the same.
“I was in Washington in March and I visited the Georgetown University Hospital, which was built I believe in 1947, but they have just added an extension at a cost of over $800 million.
“The emergency department is comparatively massive and every corridor had trolleys with patients in it. We are not outliers.
“We are struggling as many, many health services are struggling and I am doing whatever I can to try to get to a position where no patient walks out because they have had enough of waiting.”
The Minister did not, however, clarify his immediate strategy for tackling with the issue.
Seemingly unsatisfied by the Minister’s parallel with the health situation in America, the MLA took to social media with a clip of the exchange, saying: “I’m not sure if the Health Minister’s reply to my question will provide any reassurance to my constituent.”
At the start of October, Armagh I published an article about the average wait times to be seen within A&E departments in Northern Ireland with Craigavon Area Hospital‘s average sitting at six hours at that time.
According to the Emergency Care Waiting Time Statistics for January to March 2025, the target is for 95% of patients to be seen within A&E Departments is four hours.
However, the data issued in the report explains that as of March 2025, only 44.5% of patients were treated and discharged or admitted within four hours and 10,827 patients were left waiting for more than 12 hours.
The median data does reveal, however, that waiting times for patients who were discharged home was three hours and 51 minutes, while waiting times for those admitted to hospital was 13 hours and seven minutes.
Many readers replied to the article with their own experiences of waiting well over the six hours to be seen. Many said they had waited in excess of 12 hours and several reported also walking out as a result of the extended wait times.
