Hitting a long-standing target to see and treat A&E patients quickly is “virtually impossible” to achieve without a massive boost to social care, according to a top emergency medic.

David Chung, who is vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said hospitals were struggling to meet the target to see 95% of A&E patients in four hours because of challenges “in social care, in the community, in primary care [and] in district nursing.”

Health boards were instructed earlier this year to meet the 95% target by March 2020 but the most recent figures for November 2019 show the average across Scotland was 85.5%.

Dr Chung, who works as an emergency medicine consultant at Crosshouse hospital outside Kilmarnock, was asked by healthandcare.scot if there was any prospect of boards meeting the target.

“So that’s going to be virtually impossible to make good the deficits in workforce and capacity in two months. If you had said maybe could you do it in a year or 18 months – probably with the right amount of focus – but not within two months from here,” he said.

“If the process was all about the hospital then it might be achievable in some ways, if some extra capacity in the hospital that could be mobilised, whether that be extra hospital beds. But then you can run into problems of workforce, who is going to staff those beds to make them safe?”

Dr Chung said an ongoing dispute about NHS doctors being hit with massive tax charges because of changes to Treasury pensions rules was making this harder.

He warned “medical capacity has now evaporated because of the pensions issue.”

“…In the past you would have got people to do extra shifts…now the consultants can’t do them because as some have found themselves in some cases on the end of colossal pension bills.”

The A&E doctor also sounded a note of caution about a trend of reducing hospital bed numbers while shifting resources into community care.

“I think there was some aspiration that maybe we could put it all into the community and then it would build capacity and it would be cost neutral and we will not need to create any more resources anywhere else,” he said.

“The reality that we are seeing now no matter what we do – even though I think keeping people in their own homes is actually the best for the patients – it’s not necessarily cheaper and it’s going to require more resources across the board”.