Unscheduled care covers any unplanned, urgent, and emergency care provided by healthcare services. It can cover a variety of conditions but essentially refers to care which needs to be provided quickly, or in some cases immediately. 

As part of launching that work, we’ve published a data tool and an accompanying blog. The tool compiles data from across the unscheduled care system in Wales and provides a snapshot of how the system is coping.  

View our unscheduled care data tool [opens in new window].

View our blog.

What did we find?

The data in our new tool confirms an unscheduled care system under real pressure, with patients waiting a long time to receive an ambulance or be treated in an A&E department and high staff absence rates.

In February 2022, some of the most concerning points include:

• 58% of people attending an A&E department were seen within four hours. 75% of patients were seen within eight hours with 84% seen within 12 hours.  
• just over one in two (55%) of red calls received an ambulance within eight minutes.  
• 95% of ‘amber 1’ calls were responded to within five hours and for ‘amber 2’ calls within 12 hours, with 469 people across both categories waiting over 12 hours for a response. 
• the ambulance service lost 23,214 hours to handover delays, the highest number recorded to date. That equates to an average of 827 hours a day.