PATIENTS at the Emergency Department at the Royal Victoria Hospital are facing an 11-hour wait, as winter pressures kick in.
As of midday Wednesday, the average waiting time is 687 mins – a wait of 11 hours and 45 minutes – the highest across the North. Over at the Mater Hospital, it was less than two hours at 110 minutes.
Health officials have issued pleas for extra staff to come into work during an "extremely busy" holiday period.
It comes as Dr Russell McLaughlin, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in Northern Ireland, warned the situation was unsafe.
He said there is "reasonably good scientific evidence" to show that those who wait five hours or more in hospital have an increased chance of "coming to harm".
"This is about a situation where safety-compromised patients are coming to harm as a result of this delay and there is likely to be avoidable deaths in our current system," he said.
"The reasons for that primarily are as a result of what we would call 'exit block': there is simply not enough hospital beds and not enough hospital discharges to accommodate the new patients arriving."
