How might A&E departments without targets work? Look to sexual health clinics | Polly Toynbee

Accident and emergency makes the headlines. Meanwhile, under-reported services are collapsing through lack of funding

Will the secretary of state for health and social care get away with such barefaced shamelessness in his apparent plans to abolish waiting-time targets for A&E? Matt Hancock's faintly plausible excuse is that the four-hour target is a perverse incentive to treat an ingrown toenail, at three hours and 50 minutes, ahead of heart attacks and road accident victims. But most A&Es triage efficiently, diverting minor ailments to GPs on site; their real crisis is 12-hour trolley waits for very ill people queuing for reduced numbers of hospital beds.

A&Es are the thermometers of the NHS, and they reached boiling point long ago, embarrassing a government that has starved the service of funds as never before in its history. Hancock and the prime minister now regularly speak of the NHS receiving its "biggest cash boost" in history, a factoid that describes half a glass of water offered in a drought.

There was a target to give every patient access within 48 hours " But that target 'has been quietly dropped'

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