Twenty-four hours in A&E is now “no longer a documentary”, leading medics have warned, as figures show almost 400,000 patients spent a day or more in an emergency department in England last year.
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) said the very long waits are a “matter of national shame”.
Figures uncovered by the college and shared with the PA news agency show 399,908 people waited 24 hours or more in an emergency department in England in 2022-23.
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The college warned there could be a similar situation this year, with Dr Adrian Boyle, its president, cautioning that patients are coming to avoidable harm as a result of long waits.
“We know that long stays in emergency departments are harmful,” Dr Boyle said.
“There is good scientific data that shows that once people spend more than about six hours, and they need to be admitted into hospital, actually their mortality starts to get worse.
“I think it should be a matter of national shame that we have these very long waits for admitted patients.”
He said people caught up in the long waits are “often elderly and vulnerable”.
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Political parties urged to end overcrowding
The RCEM has made a number of calls to political parties in its general manifesto, including:
• To end overcrowding in emergency departments, including by ensuring there are enough hospital beds to prevent people being stuck in emergency departments when they need a bed on a ward.
• More funding for social care to prevent a system where people who no longer need hospital care can be discharged when ready.
• More emergency medicine staff to deliver “safe and sustainable care” and for more work to retain current staff.
• More data to be published on hospital performance.
• A call to “resource the NHS to ensure the emergency system can provide equitable care to all”.
Record number attend A&E
A record number of patients attended A&E in England in 2022-33, 25.3 million, up 4% from the previous year, according to figures released last week.
The data also shows 71% of people spent four hours or less in A&E in 2022-23.
The NHS recovery plan sets a target of March 2024 for 76% of patients attending A&E to be admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours, with further improvements expected the following year.
An NHS England spokesperson said: “This data relates to last year and winter, when services were facing record demand, industrial action and a twindemic of COVID and flu, but since we published our urgent and emergency care recovery plan in January we have seen significant improvements.
“Thanks to the hard work of NHS staff Category 2 ambulance response times are now an hour faster than in December, A&E four-hour performance is up from 69% to 73%, and the proportion of patients waiting 12 hours in A&E is down a sixth.
“We know there is more to do, which is why we set out our winter plans earlier than ever before this year, expanding care ‘traffic control’ centres, delivering additional ambulance hours and extra beds to boost capacity and reduce long waits for patients, and other initiatives like same day emergency care units and virtual wards which can mean patients are able to get the care they need without an unnecessary trip to an emergency department – this is better for them, and means A&E staff can continue to prioritise those with the most urgent clinical need.”
Asset manager Teucrium Investment Advisors is set to launch the first XRP-based exchange-traded fund in the US markets, a leveraged XRP (ETF) on the NYSE Arca.
The Teucrium 2x Long Daily XRP ETF will seek to offer investors two times the daily return of the XRP (XRP) token with a 1.85% management fee and annual expense ratio, according to the company’s website. The XRP-based ETF will trade under the XXRP ticker beginning April 8.
“If you have a short-term high-conviction view on XRP prices, you may consider exploring the Teucrium 2x Long Daily XRP ETF,” the alternative asset manager said.
XXRP currently has $2 million worth of net assets.
Details of Teucrium’s soon-to-be-launched XXRP ETF. Source: Teucrium
Teucrium founder and CEO Sal Gilbertie told Bloomberg on April 7 that investors had shown strong interest in an XRP ETF and hinted that it may file to list more crypto ETFs in the future.
Gilbertie was also pleased that XXRP would launch during a market downturn driven largely by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“What better time to launch a product than when prices are low?” Gilbertie told Bloomberg.
Likelihood of an approved spot XRP ETF still high: Analyst
Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said it was “very odd” to see a new asset’s first ETF come in leveraged form — however, he added that the odds of a spot XRP ETF being approved remain “pretty high.”
Source: Eric Balchunas
Several spot XRP ETF applications from the likes of Grayscale, Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Canary Capital and 21Shares are being reviewed by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In February, Balchunas and fellow Bloomberg ETF analyst James Seyffart attributed 65% approval odds to a spot XRP ETF in 2025.
Predictions market Polymarket states there is currently a 75% chance that the SEC will approve a spot XRP ETF in 2025.
Related: XRP price sell-off set to accelerate in April as inverse cup and handle hints at 25% decline
Up until recently, ETF issuers would have seen a different environment for filing for XRP ETFs as Ripple Labs — the creators of the XRP token — and the SEC battled out a four-year court battle over XRP’s security status.
That case came to a close last month.
Teucrium has amassed over $310 million worth of assets under management since it was founded in 2010.
It offers mostly agricultural commodities, such as ETFs tracking the likes of corn, soybeans, sugar and wheat.
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Australia’s corporate watchdog has been given the nod to shut down 95 “hydra” companies that it suspects engaged in crypto investment and romance scams, known as “pig butchering.”
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission’s application to wind up the companies was approved by the Federal Court of Australia on just and equitable grounds after ASIC found that most of the companies had been incorporated with false information.
Many of these companies were set up purporting to provide “genuine services” but were instead believed to be scamming their victims, ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court said in an April 8 statement.
“There appears to be a common pattern of scam activity in the nature of ‘pig butchering,’” Justice Angus Stewart said in an April 4 court ruling after looking at 48 “Reviews of Misconduct” from 17 companies accused of facilitating romance scams. The judgment was made on March 21.
Source: Rocky Perrotta
Pig butchering scams involve scammers building fake relationships with victims to win their trust before convincing them to invest in a fraudulent crypto or financial scheme.
The securities regulator also suspects that much of the scam activity is coming from Southeast Asia.
Insolvency and restructuring advisers Catherine Conneely and Thomas Birch of Cor Cordis have been appointed as joint liquidators of the 95 companies.
Related: Australian regulator’s ‘blitz’ hits crypto exchanges, money remitters
Nearly 1,500 claims by “investors” had been received by the provisional liquidators, amounting to total claims of over $35.8 million, according to the court order.
The claimants are based in 14 countries, including Australia, the US, Cameroon, Ghana, India, Nepal, the Philippines and France.
The provisional liquidators found that only three of the 95 firms had assets to their name and recommended that the other 92 companies be wound up and immediately deregistered.
ASIC shutting down scam websites
ASIC said it has been removing around 130 scam websites each week of late, bringing its total to over 10,000 sites, which have included over 7,200 fake investment platform scams and 1,564 phishing scams.
“However, these scams are like hydras: you shut down one and two more take its place. That’s why we’re warning consumers that the threat of scams and identity fraud remains high. We remind consumers to be vigilant,” Court said.
Australia’s National Anti-Scam Centre recently reported a 26% fall in scam losses to $2 billion in 2024, while the number of scam reports also fell by 17.8% to 494,732.
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The US Securities and Exchange Commission has released the list of executives from US crypto and finance giants that will take part in a roundtable discussion on crypto trading regulation.
On April 7, the regulator said its upcoming April 11 roundtable will discuss how it should handle crypto trading rules, calling it “Between a Block and a Hard Place: Tailoring Regulation for Crypto Trading.”
It will be the second in a series of discussions on crypto, headed by its recently-formed Crypto Task Force.
Taking part are Uniswap Labs chief legal officer Katherine Minarik, Cumberland DRW associate general counsel Chelsea Pizzola and Coinbase institutional product vice president Gregory Tusar — all firms that had once been in the regulator’s scope.
Under the Biden administration, the regulator sued Cumberland DRW in October and Coinbase in June 2023 for alleged securities law violations, but both lawsuits were dropped this year under the Trump administration.
The SEC also started an investigation for possible enforcement action into Uniswap Labs in April 2024, which was dropped in February with no further action.
Also taking part in the roundtable are New York Stock Exchange product chief Jon Herrick, crypto brokerage FalconX business lead Austin Reid, securities tokenizing firm Texture Capital CEO Richard Johnson and the University of California, Berkeley finance chair Christine Parlour.
Source: SEC
Dave Lauer, co-founder of the advocacy group We the Investors and Tyler Gellasch, CEO of the not-for-profit Healthy Markets Association, will also take part, while law firm Goodwin Procter partner Nicholas Losurdo will moderate the discussion.
Representing the SEC will be acting chair Mark Uyeda, Crypto Task Force chief of staff Richard Gabbert and Commissioners Caroline Crenshaw and Hester Peirce.
The roundtable is the second crypto-focused discussion in a series of five that the SEC dubbed the “Spring Sprint Toward Crypto Clarity.” The first was on March 21, regarding the legal status of crypto, while three future discussions will cover custody, tokenization, and decentralized finance (DeFi).
SEC’s Uyeda orders review of staff crypto comments
The roundtables come as the SEC, under President Donald Trump, works to revamp its oversight of the crypto industry, with its latest action being to review staff statements on crypto so they can possibly be changed or withdrawn.
Uyeda said in an April 5 statement shared by the SEC on X that due to Trump’s executive order on deregulation and recommendations from the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, he was reviewing seven staff statements, five of which concerned crypto.
Source: SEC
“The purpose of this review is to identify staff statements that should be modified or rescinded consistent with current agency priorities,” Uyeda said.
Related: SEC paints ‘a distorted picture’ of USD stablecoin market — Crenshaw
The first on the list was an April 2019 analysis from the Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology on how crypto sales could be investment contracts under the securities defining Howey test — an argument the agency had made to sue multiple crypto firms for legal violations.
Also up for review are two Division of Investment Management statements, one from May 2021 asking investors to consider the risks of funds with exposure to Bitcoin futures and a November 2020 statement asking for feedback on whether state-chartered banks meet standards to be qualified custodians.
The SEC will also look into a December 2022 Division of Corporation Finance statement that urged SEC-regulated companies to evaluate their disclosures to mention if a slew of crypto firm bankruptcies and collapses at the time impacted their business.
Finally, the agency will review a Division of Examinations alert from February 2021 that said, “a number of activities related to the offer, sale and trading of digital assets that are securities present unique risks to investors.”
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