NHS bosses urge all hospitals in England to use ‘digital triage’ process to combat overcrowding in emergency services

Patients who turn up at A&E with non-urgent ailments could be told to come back another time under NHS plans to stop hospitals becoming overcrowded and avoid the service’s usual winter crisis.

Eighteen hospitals in England are already using “digital triage assessment” to help A&E staff decide which patients need to be seen right away or be dealt with in another way. If patients do need urgent care they are treated at once in the usual way. But if they have more minor ailments and can wait, they are told to come back later that day or the next day, or are referred to a community-based service, such as a GP or pharmacy.

Senior medical staff call for solutions to tackle root causes of excess deaths amid tenfold increase in a decade

More than 1,300 patients a month in England are dying needlessly due to long A&E waits, a tenfold rise in a decade, figures suggest.

There were more than 300 deaths linked to long waits every week in 2025, up from 30 a week in 2015, according to analysis by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.