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The deaths of an estimated 500 people each week caused by delays in emergency care is “not a short-term thing”, a senior health official has said.

Ian Higginson, vice-president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, hit out at any attempt to “discredit” previous warnings from his organisation that as many as 500 people are dying every week because of delays in emergency care.

Mr Higginson told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “What we’ve been hearing over the last few days is that the current problems are all due to Covid or they’re all due to flu, or that this is complex, you mustn’t jump to conclusions – all that sort of stuff.

“If you’re at the front line, you know that this is a longstanding problem. This isn’t a short-term thing. The sort of things we’re seeing happen every winter, and it still seems to come as a surprise to the NHS.”

The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Dr Adrian Boyle, told Times Radio on Monday that somewhere between 300 and 500 people are dying each week as a result of delays and problems with urgent and emergency care.

“We need to actually get a grip of this,” he said.

It comes after more than a dozen NHS trusts and ambulance services declared critical incidents over the festive period.

Last week, one in five ambulance patients in England waited more than an hour to be handed over to A&E teams.

NHS trusts have a target of 95% of ambulance handovers to be completed within 30 minutes, and 100% within 60 minutes.

In November, 37,837 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E for a decision to be admitted to a hospital department, according to figures from NHS England.

This is an increase of almost 355% compared with the previous November, when the figure was 10,646.

Mr Higginson added that the Royal College of Emergency Medicine figures on deaths caused by delays were more than a “guesstimate”.

“We have really good evidence that has been accumulated over decades that long waits in emergency departments are associated with poor outcomes for patients,” he said.

“These are real figures and I worry that we’re going to hear attempts to spin and manipulate this data and discredit it. I think if we hear that, we’ve got to say no – that is spin.

“This is a real problem. It’s happening now in our emergency departments.”