Mental health crisis: patients left for days in A&E as hospitals struggle to cope

Mental health patients in crisis are spending days and days in England’s emergency departments before getting appropriate care.

The data obtained by Channel 4 News is backed up by figures shared exclusively with this programme by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, showing these patients are twice as likely to wait more than 12 hours to be discharged or transferred than all other patients.

And the number of mental health beds has more than halved over the last two decades.