North West NHS denies report highlighting long waits for mental health support

A North West NHS trust has denied that a patient needing mental health support had to wait for the equivalent of 36 days to get help.

It follows a report which said that patients across England waited for a total of more than 5.4 million hours in A&E while experiencing a mental health crisis last year, Labour has said.

According to the party, figures obtained through freedom of information requests show that last year one patient at Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust waited in A&E for 860 hours, the equivalent of 36 days, while suffering a mental health crisis.

Silas Nicholls, the Chief Executive, Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, has give us a statement.

“We responded to an FOI in July 2023 asking for the single longest amount of time, in hours, that an individual adult spent in A&E, where their chief complaint was mental health related, broken down by financial year, since 2010, by breaking down each year’s longest wait into minutes.

“Our longest wait was reported in the FOI as 51,597 minutes in 2022/23. Following investigation, the Trust has established that this information was incorrect and related to an individual who attended A&E and subsequently absconded on the same day. They re-attended A&E the following month and were ultimately discharged that day.

“Therefore, the FOI information is incorrect.”

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