Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells A&E: 12-hour waits hit 686

In September, 686 patients at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust waited more than 12 hours for a hospital bed after A&E decided to admit them. A year earlier the figure was 96.

It is the highest monthly count for the trust in the 18 months of figures published since April 2025. The trust runs the emergency departments at Tunbridge Wells Hospital in Pembury and at Maidstone Hospital. (NHS England, A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions, September 2026)

The trust also saw 74.9 per cent of its A&E patients within four hours in September. That is its lowest share in the same 18 months, and down from 81.4 per cent a year earlier. NHS England published the September figures on 8 October.

The three A&Es nearest the district

The Sevenoaks district has no major emergency department of its own. Residents are most likely to end up at one of three trusts. Here is how each did in September 2026, against September 2025.

All figures are NHS England’s monthly provider data for each trust as a whole. (NHS England, A&E by provider, September 2026) The September 2025 figures are the revised ones from the previous year’s series. (NHS England, A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2025-26)

Two caveats matter for readers here:

• These headline figures are trust-wide. The Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells numbers combine both its emergency departments. A separate NHS England dataset splits them by hospital, below.
• King’s is mostly a London picture. Its figures cover King’s College Hospital in Denmark Hill as well as the Princess Royal University Hospital in Farnborough. The PRUH is the closer of the two for the west of the district, around Halstead and Westerham.

Hospital by hospital

NHS England also publishes figures for each hospital from the Emergency Care Data Set. These cover major emergency departments only, not minor injury units or urgent treatment centres. That is why the shares are lower than the trust headlines above. The figures are provisional, rounded to the nearest five, and published as experimental statistics. (NHS England, ECDS Performance, September 2026, provisional)

The 12-hour column here is a different measure from the trolley waits above. It counts everyone who spent more than 12 hours in the department from arrival, whether or not they were admitted.

Three things stand out:

• Tunbridge Wells did worse than Maidstone on every measure. More than one patient in eight at Pembury spent over 12 hours in A&E.
• Patients who needed a bed waited longest. At Pembury, only about one in six admitted patients left A&E within four hours. At the PRUH it was fewer than one in ten.
• Sevenoaks Hospital is run by the same trust. It logged 1,115 attendances in September, none of them longer than 12 hours.

What the two measures mean

The four-hour figure is the share of everyone who came to A&E who was admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours of arriving. The 12-hour figure is narrower. It counts patients who waited more than 12 hours between a doctor deciding to admit them and actually getting a bed on a ward. These are often called trolley waits.

The 12-hour count does not include people who waited 12 hours or more and then went home. (NHS England, A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions)

Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells, month by month

The trust’s four-hour performance was above 80 per cent through most of spring and summer 2025. It dipped to 75.0 per cent in January 2026, recovered to 80.6 per cent in May, then fell again from July.

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The 12-hour trolley waits followed the same shape, but September’s jump stands out. The previous high was 629 in January, the worst month of last winter.

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The four-hour shares are calculated from NHS England’s monthly CSV files, counting all A&E departments and booked appointments, which is how NHS England calculates its own headline figure. For September 2026 they match the published provider table exactly. (NHS England, A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2026-27)

September was also busy. The trust recorded 23,409 attendances, up from 23,227 a year earlier. Only October 2025, at 23,823, was busier in the 18 months.

The target

NHS England’s planning framework for 2026/27 to 2028/29 sets every trust a goal of seeing 82 per cent of A&E patients within four hours by March 2027. The national aim is 85 per cent as the average across 2028/29. Trusts are also expected to have a higher share of patients leaving A&E within 12 hours in 2026/27 than in 2025/26. (NHS England, Medium term planning framework: delivering change together 2026/27 to 2028/29)

On September’s figures:

• Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells is 7.1 points short of 82 per cent.
• Dartford and Gravesham is 1.9 points short.
• King’s College Hospital is 12.8 points short.

What it means for you

• Call 999 in an emergency. None of these figures should put anyone off going to A&E when they need to.
• For anything urgent but not life-threatening, use NHS 111 first. It can book you a time at an urgent treatment centre or arrange a call back from a clinician. (NHS, When to use 111)
• Ambulance times are a separate problem. Our freedom of information figures show how long 999 calls in the TN13 to TN16 postcodes waited for an ambulance last year: Sevenoaks ambulance times: up to twice the 7-minute target.

NHS England publishes October’s figures on 12 November.

Sources

• NHS England, A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2026-27 (monthly CSV and provider files, April to September 2026)
• NHS England, ECDS Performance by hospital site, September 2026 (provisional)
• NHS England, A&E by provider, September 2026
• NHS England, A&E Attendances and Emergency Admissions 2025-26 (revised monthly CSV files, April 2025 to March 2026)
• NHS England, Medium term planning framework 2026/27 to 2028/29
• NHS, When to use 111

Image: Tunbridge Wells Hospital, by N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Geograph (Wikimedia Commons file, Geograph 6571232). Charts by Sevenoaks Online.