Fewer than half of patients attending Northern Ireland emergency departments during the second quarter of 2026 completed their visit within four hours, new official statistics show.
The Department of Health recorded 210,660 attendances between April and June. Of those visits, 42.8 per cent lasted less than four hours, compared with 44.7 per cent during the same quarter in 2025.
There were 71,018 attendances in June alone, an increase of 2,778 or 4.1 per cent on June last year. The number of people spending more than 12 hours in emergency care rose from 11,133 to 11,605 and represented 16.7 per cent of attendances covered by that measure.
The median wait from arrival to triage was 14 minutes. After triage, the median time before treatment began was one hour and 38 minutes, while 55.9 per cent of patients started treatment within two hours. The corresponding figure in June 2025 was 58.6 per cent.
For patients admitted to hospital from a Type 1 emergency department, the median total time was 13 hours and 45 minutes. That was 36 minutes shorter than a year earlier. Patients discharged home spent a median of five hours and five minutes in a Type 1 department.
The department classifies the figures as official statistics in development while health trusts continue to stabilise data drawn from the encompass patient-record system. Some measures exclude the Type 3 urgent-care centres at Craigavon and Daisy Hill because their information is held on a separate system.