The Royal College of Emergency Medicine dismissed excuses about bad weather and flu and urged patients to write to their MPs to demand improvement.

A&E units saw only 85 per cent of patients within four hours in February, worse than the previous low of 85.1 per cent seen in December and January last year. In major hospitals, the figure was 76.9 per cent, also the lowest since records began in 2010, and in some units barely half of patients were dealt with in time. It means 100,000 more people suffered longer delays than last year.

NHS chiefs blamed an inexorably rising tide of sicker patients, with this winter seeing 261,000 more people coming to A&E than last year, up 5 per cent. More of these patients were also ill enough to need a bed, with emergency admissions up 6 per cent to 1.4 million. Wards were about 95 per cent full all winter, well above the 85 per cent estimated to be safe.

Taj Hassan, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “Performance that once would have been regarded as utterly unacceptable has now become normal and things are seemingly only getting worse for patients. It’s important to remember that while performance issues are more pronounced during the winter, emergency departments are now struggling all year round.”

In January the heads of half of England’s A&E units wrote to the prime minister to warn her that patients were dying in corridors.

Dr Hassan said: “The current crisis in our emergency departments and in the wider NHS is not the fault of patients. It is not because staff aren’t working hard enough, not because of the actions of individual trusts, not because of the weather or norovirus, not purely because of influenza, immigration or inefficiencies and not because performance targets are unfeasible. The current crisis was wholly predictable and is due to a failure to prioritise the need to increase healthcare funding on an urgent basis.”

He added: “We need an adequate number of hospital beds, more resources for social care and to fund our staffing strategies that we have previously agreed in order to deliver decent basic dignified care. We would urge our patients to contact their MP to tell them so.”

Nigel Edwards, head of the Nuffield Trust think tank, said that A&Es were in their worst shape since 2004.

“The main waiting times targets for cancer and planned treatment are being missed, and there is no sign of recovery,” he said. “Fundamentally, these pressures are driven by a lack of money and staff. If these are not addressed it is inevitable that as difficult as February has been for NHS staff and patients there will be worse to come.”

Figures from the British Social Attitudes survey last week showed dissatisfaction with the NHS up seven points to its highest level since 2007, with most people blaming the government.

A spokesman for NHS England said: “NHS staff continued to work hard in February in the face of a ‘perfect storm’ of appalling weather, persistently high flu hospitalisations and a renewed spike in norovirus. Despite a challenging winter, the NHS treated 160,000 more A&E patients within four hours this winter, compared with the previous year. The NHS also treated a record number of cancer patients over these most pressured months of the year.”

He pointed to figures showing that 22,800 routine operations had been cancelled in January, less than half the number feared.

However, the Royal College of Surgeons pointed out that 62,000 fewer operations were carried out this winter, despite rising demand, because procedures were not scheduled in the first place to help take pressure off A&Es.

Professor Derek Alderson, its president, said: “NHS England’s advice to hospitals to cancel all elective operations in January was a necessary evil under the circumstances. It meant patients avoided the distress of having their operation cancelled after turning up to hospital and it freed up NHS staff and resources to deal with patients needing emergency treatment. However, it also inevitably prevented many patients who are in discomfort or pain from having an operation when they needed it, potentially causing their condition to deteriorate.”

Loneliness, overstretched hospitals and the crumbling elderly care system could all be contributing to a sharp increase in deaths, which suggests that British life expectancy is about to start falling, academics say. They have called for an urgent investigation after the latest in a string of figures that show older people are dying earlier than expected.

Infant mortality has also risen, with dozens more babies dying in 2016 than the previous year.

After decades of rising life expectancy, progress has stalled in recent years in Britain, while it continues in many other countries. In January The Times revealed that in some struggling parts of the country life expectancy has dropped by a year since 2011.

Now provisional figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 93,990 people died in the first seven weeks of this year, up 12.4 per cent on the average for the previous five years, an extra 10,375 deaths. This is the biggest difference since 1940, when deaths were up by 16 per cent, and the fourth biggest since 1840, Danny Dorling, an Oxford professor who analysed the figures, said.

He said that it was quite remarkable, adding: “People have become a bit immune to this. Five years ago this would have got a lot more attention, this huge number of people dying.”

Writing in the BMJ, Professor Dorling linked the deaths to hospitals that were “struggling to cope” in winter as they were deluged by frail elderly patients with nowhere else to go. “It’s Alzheimer’s, dementia and so on, these are things people are dying of. It’s frail people. People are dying two or three years earlier than they would do.”

Such people may also be more isolated because bus services were reduced and relatives working longer hours during difficult economic times were unable to visit them, he speculated.

He insisted that flu and winter cold could not explain all the deaths and officials must look at deeper causes. Respiratory illness such as flu were responsible for 18.7 per cent of fatalities, barely up from 18.3 per cent in the same period last year. “It ain’t flu and it wasn’t flu before,” he said.

He wants the Commons health and social care committee to investigate, saying the government is “just not interested”.

Caroline Abrahams, of Age UK, said: “It is extremely worrying that more older people are dying during what was a relatively mild winter. Older people have felt the brunt of long-standing cuts to social care and stagnant funding for the NHS.”

Separate ONS figures yesterday showed that deaths of babies under one rose from 3.7 per 1,000 to 3.8 per 1,000 in 2016, the second year in a row they increased after decades of decline.

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat former care minister, said: “The government must urgently examine the cause and what might be driving this disturbing reversal of historic falls in infant mortality. The fact that the NHS is under such strain may well be contributing to this.”

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “We are absolutely committed to helping people live long and healthy lives, which is why the NHS was given top priority in the autumn budget, with an extra £2.8 billion, on top of a planned £10 billion a year increase by 2020-21. Along with Public Health England, we will consider this.”

Analysis

In the first 49 days of this year, an extra person died every seven minutes compared with the five years before. This is not a one-off, because deaths were also higher than normal last year after a jump in early 2015 (Chris Smyth writes).

Because so many older people are dying sooner than expected, life expectancy has stopped increasing. If this year’s trend continues, British lives will start to become shorter, something unprecedented in modern times. The growing chorus from academics demanding investigation deserves to be heeded, but finding the reason will not be easy. The issue goes far wider than the NHS and social care — people’s health is influenced by their jobs, homes and families.

Given the lack of certainty, the risk is that the data will simply become ammunition for political skirmishes about whether “austerity kills”. This makes ministers and the officials who report to them understandably wary of looking into what is happening.