A spokesman for pressure group London Health Emergency said surveys by English and Welsh community health councils and Scottish health councils the Association of Community Health Councils showed patients in some hospitals were facing "utterly unacceptable" waits for treatment.

He said: "This is a desperate situation and what is worse is that so many of the victims of these conditions seem to be the elderly, who have paid all their lives for the health service and are often least able to make a fuss."

He blamed cuts in bed numbers and said hospital casualty units concentrated too much on minor injuries instead of the 25-30% of people who needed to be admitted for treatment.

The Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association blamed bed shortages for the crisis.

It said shortage of beds in intensive care units was "dire and grossly under-reported" and was getting worse.

Dr Ian Bogle: GPs are not to blame for casualty crisis

"Most hospital intensive care units are full to overflowing," said one consultant.

"The flu is an excuse invented by politicians as a means to cover up the lack of ITU facilities caused by chronic underfunding."

The British Medical Association (BMA) said bed shortages and long waits were "symptomatic of an overstretched health service under extreme straing".

But it said suggestions that patients were going to casualty units because they could not see their doctors were unfounded.

"The majority of long waiters in A&E, as recorded in the survey, are there because they require a hospital bed and not the services of their family doctor," said Dr Ian Bogle, chairman of the BMA Council.

Staff shortages and more patients

A spokesman for the British Association for Accident and Emergency Medicine said staff shortages and increasing numbers of patients were also to blame for the problems in casualty.

In the last two years, the number of people visiting hospital casualty departments have risen by 2% to 3%.

The spokesman added: "The worst waiting times related to people with diarrhoea and they cannot go on to a normal ward because they would infect everyone else.

"Those patients need to be put in a side ward, and that is the reason for the length of the wait."

Two Birmingham hospitals were in the top six for waiting times. One, the Good Hope Hospital in North Birmingham was hit by a diarrhoea and vomiting outbreak and had to close for admission of the day of the survey.

Patients had to be transferred to nearby hospitals.

Improvements

Despite some long waits, the surveys show improvements on last year's figures.

Tim Jones of the NHS Confederation, which represents hospital managers, said it was "encouraging" to see that only four of the patients in the top 17 for long waits were waiting on trolleys.

"This reflects improvements in caring for patients' pre-admission," he stated, adding that the government's announcement of an extra cash for casualty units would further improve the situation.

Bob Abberley, head of health for public service union Unison, said: "Clearly the government has got a lot of work to do to win back public confidence, but despite individual inhuman waits this year's survey shows the NHS is heading in the right direction."

Alan Duncan: survey makes grim reading

But Alan Duncan, Conservative spokesman on health, said the survey results were "pretty grim".

He said Labour had made the health service problems worse by its "obsession" with waiting lists instead of waiting times and excessive bureaucracy.