FactCheck has been looking at what’s really going on in accident and emergency departments this week.

We think A&E departments are under real pressure, but there are reasons to be cheerful too. About nine in 10 patients will spend less than four hours in an emergency ward, and average waiting times aren’t getting worse.

All of the latest statistics relate to England though, the only country whose health service is still run from Westminster.

Readers have been asking us what the state of play is in the rest of the UK. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has also suggested that the figure for the percentage of people treated within four hours in English hospitals “is actually better than any other country in the world that measures these things”.

The analysis

The latest figures show that 92.6 per cent of people attending A&E in England were treated, discharged or transferred within four hours from October to December 2014. The target is 95 per cent.

This takes place against a background or rising numbers of people turning up at A&E departments in England: more than a million more patients were seen in the third quarter of 2014/15 compared to the same period in 2004/05.

There’s a huge difference in the volume of patients seen in different parts of the UK. Nearly 22 million people attended A&E in England in 2013/14, compared to 1.6 million people in Scotland and fewer than a million in both Wales and Northern Ireland.

Per head of population, attendance rates are higher in England and Northern Ireland than Wales and Scotland.

The rest of the UK

The Scottish government also has the 95 per cent four-hour target, and it is also failing to meet it. The latest stats put the percentage of patients dealt with in four hours or less at 93.5 per cent in September last year.

That’s a bit better than England and at least things aren’t getting worse in Scotland. Annual figures for 2013 and 2014 were exactly the same.

But there is less pressure on A&E departments north of the border. Attendance has been static for the last few years:

In Wales 83.8 per cent of patients spent less than four hours in accident and emergency in November 2014, down from 89.6 per cent a year earlier.

In Northern Ireland the latest annual percentage is just 78.1 per cent, a figure that has fallen steadily since 09/10.

In both Wales and Northern Ireland attendances at A&E have also not changed significantly in recent years.

So no health service in the UK can boast that 95 per cent of patients spend less than four hours in A&E at the moment.

SNP-run Scotland is slightly ahead of England while Labour-run Wales is in third place and Northern Ireland brings up the rear. But none of the rest of the UK is facing the rapidly rising demand we are seeing in England.

Of course the four-hour target is just one performance indicator. There are countless other ways to compare the service patients are getting in the different countries of the UK.

The rest of the world

Some studies have compared the overall NHS pretty favourably to systems in other countries.

Last year the US-based Commonwealth Fund ranked the NHS number one of 11 health services in leading economies. And state expenditure on health as a share of GDP was lower than in most of the other countries.

There is less research into emergency care alone.

However, government researchers have found seven countries or states that use similar A&E performance indicators as England, including a treatment-within-four-hours target.

England had the toughest standards for A&E waits, but came the closest to hitting its target. Waiting time performance was better in England than in some places with less demand for services (the numbers are slightly out of date):

The quirks of the different systems make it difficult to compare like with like, but England’s A&E wards performed pretty well when held up against systems with similar targets.

This doesn’t quite stand up Mr Hunt’s claim that England does “better than any other country in the world that measures these things”. The Department of Health could not back that up with specific research when we challenged them.

But it doesn’t shoot him down in flames either.