Six Days in A&E: Children Among Mental-Health Patients Stuck in East Kent’s Emergency Departments

East Kent Hospitals’ own papers reveal one-to-six-day waits, two-hourly executive escalations and a shortage of specialist mental-health beds which the Trust says is not expected to ease imminently.

Six days in A&E.

Not six hours. Six days.

Buried deep inside East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust’s latest Board papers is a disclosure which ought to stop anyone in their tracks. The papers, prepared for the Trust Board meeting on 1 October 2026, include the latest reports from its Quality and Safety Committee.

At its meeting on 15 September, that Committee was told that long waits for mental-health patients in emergency departments remained a “serious concern”. Reported waits were running at between one and six days, and those affected included children and young people. Cases are being escalated through the Trust’s executive chain every two hours, yet the problem persists because of limited specialist-bed availability.

One important qualification: the document does not say that a child waited the full six days. It says waits ranged from one to six days and that children and young people were among the patients affected. Nor does it identify whether the six-day wait occurred at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford or Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother Hospital in Margate.

But what the papers do establish is serious enough.

This isn’t simply an unfortunate spike in demand. The Trust has a formal high-level risk — scored 16 — that mental-health patients presenting at its emergency departments may remain there for more than 12 hours. More tellingly, its forecast says that, despite improved pathways, the risk is “not expected to de-escalate imminently” because of the shortage of acute mental-health inpatient beds.

And here is the particularly uncomfortable part. Once a patient who is medically fit for discharge has spent more than 12 hours in A&E waiting for a mental-health bed, East Kent Hospitals now triggers a Clinical Harm Review and a Datix patient-safety report. Patients are tracked daily and the Trust intends to report resulting harm and learning through its governance system.

So twelve hours is serious enough to trigger a harm review.

Yet some people are remaining there for days.

Nor was September’s disclosure unforeseeable. When the Care Quality Commission inspected QEQM’s urgent and emergency service in January, it found mental-health patients experiencing delays of “several days” while waiting for suitable specialist inpatient beds. The CQC rated the department’s Safe domain Inadequate and said governance arrangements for mental-health patients were not sufficiently effective or embedded.

At William Harvey Hospital, inspectors found the same underlying pressure. During their February inspection, one mental-health patient had already been in the department for four days awaiting placement. The CQC said that although the mental-health assessment environment itself was safe, it was not appropriate for stays lasting several days. William Harvey’s urgent and emergency service was subsequently rated Requires Improvement.

The wider A&E numbers make the backdrop still bleaker. In August, East Kent Hospitals’ Type 1 four-hour performance fell to just 45.3%. The proportion of patients spending more than 12 hours in its emergency departments increased to 21.8% of Type 1 arrivals, around six additional 12-hour breaches every day compared with the previous position. board-of-directors-meeting-pack…

The staffing review gives an extraordinary picture of what this means operationally. At William Harvey, an average 47.7 patients were remaining in A&E beyond 12 hours, while admitted patients waited an average 21 hours for an inpatient bed. The report specifically notes complex mental-health patients sometimes requiring security support. At QEQM, an average 35.5 patients remained beyond 12 hours. board-of-directors-meeting-pack… board-of-directors-meeting-pack…

Children are being caught in this system too. William Harvey’s children’s emergency department had a 17.1% nursing vacancy rate, while QEQM’s stood at 18.9%. board-of-directors-meeting-pack… Nationally, the Royal College of Nursing revealed in May that around half a million under-18s had attended A&E in mental-health crisis since 2019, with some waiting as long as three days before transfer to a mental-health unit. Estimated 12-hour-plus waits among children rose from 237 cases in 2019 to 802 in 2025.

There is investment coming. Kent and Medway’s NHS announced in August that dedicated mental-health emergency provision would be developed around William Harvey and QEQM, designed to give people same-day specialist assessment in environments better suited to mental-health crisis than conventional A&E.

That is welcome. But it doesn’t answer the question buried in East Kent Hospitals’ own risk register.

Where does someone go after they have been assessed if the inpatient bed they need does not exist?

A new assessment centre can improve the surroundings, speed up clinical assessment and keep somebody out of a conventional emergency department. It cannot conjure an acute psychiatric bed into existence.

East Kent Hospitals and the wider Kent and Medway system should now publish the numbers behind this disclosure: how many patients have waited more than 24, 48 and 72 hours; how many were children; the longest wait experienced by a child or young person; how many Clinical Harm Reviews and Datix reports these waits have generated; what harm was identified; and how many patients eventually had to be placed outside Kent.

Because two-hourly escalation demonstrates that senior managers know somebody is stuck.

It does not give that patient somewhere safe to go.

The Shepway Vox Team

Not Owned Offshore, By Hedgefunds Or Barons