Nursing and other healthcare leaders have welcomed a plan to tackle the urgent and emergency care crisis with cautious optimism.
The UK Government and NHS England published a new Urgent and Emergency Care Plan 2025-26 today.
“This is a plan high in ambition, but low on detail”
Nicola Ranger
The plan made a number of pledges, to be met by the end of the financial year, aimed at easing waiting times for patients.
These included reducing ambulance wait times for category 2 (serious conditions such as a stroke) patients from 35 to 30 minutes; meeting 45-minute ambulance handover time standards; ensuring 78% of patients who attend A&E are dealt with within four hours; and reducing discharge times.
As well as this, it included aims to increase vaccination rates for frontline staff, back towards pre-pandemic levels, and to increase the number of patients receiving urgent care in community and primary care settings, not in hospital settings.
The government said it hoped the plan would mean that 800,000 fewer patients each year would wait more than four hours at A&E this year.
The plan further laid out dozens of other pledges, ranging from reviewing sepsis guidance to testing the use of health visitors to administer childhood influenza vaccinations and other routine immunisations.
It also reiterated the UK Government’s plans to publish league tables on NHS trust performance and promoting the use of digital technology to deliver care remotely.
To meet these goals, the government has pledged around £450m.
This includes £370m in capital investment for the creation of 40 new same-day emergency care and urgent treatment centres, new mental health crisis centres and more capacity for mental health inpatient settings.
Some of this money will, the plan stated, go towards expanding access to care records for paramedics so they can make more informed decisions on caring for patients.
Further investment will go towards acquiring 500 new ambulances by March 2026.
This urgent and emergency care plan comes ahead of the publication of the NHS 10 Year Health Plan, which is due in the summer.
Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting said: “No patient should ever be left waiting for hours in hospital corridors or for an ambulance which ought to arrive in minutes.
“We can’t fix more than a decade of underinvestment and neglect overnight.
“But through the measures we’re setting out today, we will deliver faster and more convenient care for patients in emergencies.”
Wes Streeting
Today’s plan stated that addressing urgent and emergency care “cannot wait” until the 10-year plan was finished.
In its introduction, the plan’s authors stated that the current state of this part of the health system “does not meet the standards our patients need or our frontline staff want to deliver”.
It cited the fact that it had been more than five years since the 18-minute response time for category 2 ambulance calls had been met, and more than a decade since the target for 95% of A&E patients to be seen within four hours had been met.
It also acknowledged issues such as corridor care, staff burnout, dissatisfaction with services from the public and delayed discharges.
These same issues have been repeatedly highlighted by organisations such as the Royal College of Nursing (RCN), which has, in recent years, placed particular pressure on governments to address corridor care.
RCN general secretary and chief executive Professor Nicola Ranger dubbed the new plan as “a welcome admission” from the government that corridor care was “unacceptable”, and said it was evidence that the voices of nurses had been listened to.
She welcomed the specific actions laid out in the plan, in particular the promise to publish more data on urgent and emergency care waits and corridor care.
“We will deliver faster and more convenient care for patients in emergencies”
Wes Streeting
However, Professor Ranger said: “This is a plan high in ambition, but low on detail of how the nursing staff needed to make this work will be supported to deliver these changes.
“Investment in new treatment and assessment centres, reducing the need for admission to hospital and speeding up discharge are desperately needed, but none of this can be achieved unless there is a commitment to invest in an overworked and understaffed nursing workforce.
“Those in government must recognise that their plans will also require investment in the nursing staff to deliver them.”
The RCN boss said failing to invest in nursing would be “adding even greater pressures” to the profession, which she said was “on the brink”.
Similarly, Professor Steve Turner, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said he looked forward to seeing “detailed plans” to support the workforce from the government, but aired his optimism at the goals laid out in today’s plan.
NHS Providers chief executive Daniel Elkeles said there was “a lot to like” about the plan.
He said: “This plan should result in meaningful progress compared to last winter.
“As the plan acknowledges the public and our staff want to know the NHS can respond quickly, safely and effectively in an emergency.
“NHS Providers would like to work with NHS England and the government to develop long-term [urgent and emergency care] plans that are bold and ambitious.”
