NHS: More Patients Waiting in Ambulances

The queues to get a hospital bed are backing up even further – first it was waiting in hospital corridors on trolleys, then in Accident and Emergency departments, now it is in ambulances lining up outside hospitals.

The number of patients waiting at least an hour to be transferred from an ambulance into an NHS A&E department has doubled in England over the past two years, causing distress for patients and keeping ambulances off the road.

Figures obtained by the Labour Party through Freedom of Information requests have revealed that 51,115 people waited longer than 60 minutes in a parked ambulance during 2014-15.

Just two years later that number had risen to 111,524, prompting fears about patient safety.

Shadow Health Secretary Jon Ashworth said the figures showed “an ambulance service pushed to the brink“ by what he described as years of “Tory under-investment.”

“It’s clear that NHS services last year were operating at the absolute limit of what they could cope with,” he said. “There is no excuse for the Government to allow another crisis on this scale to develop this year. They’ve been well warned and they should take action to sort it out.”

The increased number of patients who had to wait for at least an hour in an ambulance was more pronounced in some parts of the country. The figures obtained from the South East Coast ambulance service showed the number of patients waiting there had quadrupled, while in London it almost trebled.

On the other hand, South Western ambulance service was the only one of the 10 English ambulance trusts to record a decline, by almost a third.

Risk of Harm

The sight of ambulances lining up outside hospitals has become familiar in recent years.

None of the targets set for NHS ambulance response times have been met since May 2015.

Earlier this year NHS Improvement said that tolerating ambulance handover delays was “tolerating significant risk of harm to patients.”

In advice to ambulance services and hospitals in March, NHSI wrote: ”It is crucial that patients are assessed on arrival in the ED (emergency departments) and ambulance crews are freed up to attend the next emergency call.”

Ashworth added that Prime Minister Theresa May faced a choice in this month’s Budget. “Give the NHS the money it needs to deliver a decent standard of care, or leave NHS patients stranded in pain in the back of ambulances because the hospitals are just too full to cope.”

A Department of Health spokeswoman said the Government wanted to see better performances from hospital and ambulance services. “In the face of huge increases in demand, our paramedics and handlers are working exceptionally hard and answering 4,500 more 999 calls every day compared to five years ago,” she said. “Nevertheless, we expect patient handovers from ambulance to A&E to happen within 30 minutes and where delays occur hospital and ambulance trusts have a responsibility to make improvements.”

The publication of the figures on ambulance handover delays coincided with the latest quarterly monitoring report from the King’s Fund, which also illustrated the pressures facing the NHS.

Half of the 85 (out of a total of 233) NHS trust directors who responded to a survey by the health policy think tank said patient care in their area had deteriorated over the last year. Less than half of trusts (45%) expect to meet their financial targets this year, the survey found.

Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at the King’s Fund, described the results as “sobering” and said they showed “NHS funding pressures are now having a real impact on the people using its services”. Like Labour’s John Ashworth he urged the Government to make additional funding available in the Budget.

Despite dire warnings from doctors and nurses organisations about the potential crisis that could hit the NHS this iwnter the Department of Health spokeswoman insisted the NHS was “better prepared for winter than ever before, supported by an additional £100m funding for A&Es and £2bn for social care.”

by Bob Graham

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