Shropshire Star

'A year's wait' for ambulances outside West Midlands hospitals in just four weeks

Ambulances spent the equivalent of more than a year waiting outside West Midland hospitals in just a four-week period due to clogged A&E departments, new figures have revealed.

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West Midlands Ambulance Service clocked up 9,874 hours waiting because hospitals were too full to admit patients between December 15 and January 11 – a total of 411 days.

And charity crews from the Red Cross and St John Ambulance were roped in hundreds of times to help out.

The number of St John Ambulance shifts covered in that time was 469.

West Midlands Ambulance Service's chief executive recently said the A&E backlog was causing the busiest period he had ever known in his career.

Ambulances are regularly seen waiting outside A&E units with hospitals unable to take in the patients.

It has led to regular fines for hospital trusts. They are forced to fork out £200 every time an ambulance has to wait more than 30 minutes to get back out onto the road. And the fine rises to £1,000 on each occasion the ambulance is at the hospital for an hour or longer.

West Midlands Ambulance Service spokeswoman Suzie Wheaton said bosses were regularly working with hospitals to find solutions to the ongoing problem.

She added: "During times of peak demand, West Midlands Ambulance Service does encounter delays at hospitals.

"This can consequently effect how quickly ambulances are able to handover patients to A&E. If ambulances have to wait to offload patients, they are not available to respond to other 999 calls.

"We continue to work closely with the hospitals across the region and other local health colleagues to find solutions to issues that arise during this extremely busy period."

Ambulance delays have soared recently at Wolverhampton's New Cross Hospital.

Between April and October last year just two ambulances had to wait more than hour to get back out onto the road.

But in November, December and January there were 63 occasions when the hospital's backlogged A&E unit caused ambulances to wait more than 60 minutes. In total ambulances had to wait more than 30 minutes to drop patients off at New Cross on 655 occasions last year.

Bosses at the hospital have been fined £159,600 in total for the many breaches.

Across the country some 1,780 days of operational time was lost because hospitals were too full to admit patients between December 15 and January 11.

The 42,726 hours of delays are equivalent to taking 64 ambulances out of service at the same time.

On 11,203 occasions over that period crews waited more than an hour to hand over emergency patients. And patients experienced handover delays of more than half an hour 39,523 times.

Ambulance services were also forced to spend more than £5m hiring private crews and charities to cope with demand. Mrs Wheaton said of the use of private crews: "West Midlands Ambulance Service does not use emergency vehicles or staff from private agencies.

"The trust, however, can confirm in periods of high demand we do utilise crews from Red Cross and St John's Ambulance.

"Primarily these resources are used for GP referrals, for example if a GP requests for an ambulance to take a patient to hospital at normal road speed. However, if they are the nearest resource to an emergency call they can be dispatched to such an incident but will always be backed up by a WMAS crew."

In London, 6,833 hours were lost and in the East Midlands crews recorded 6,761 hours of delays. In the Eastern region, patients were forced to wait in ambulances for more than an hour on 2,049 occasions, in the East Midlands 2,043 and in the North West 1,854 times.

Christina McAnea, head of health at Unison, said: "Members sometimes tweet us photos of queues of ambulances outside A&E departments.

"That is such a waste of time and resources for very experienced, qualified staff who could be out there helping patients if the rest of the system was running smoothly."

A spokesman for NHS England said: "There has been an unprecedented level of demand for all frontline services this winter, which has put every part of the NHS under pressure. We have invested over £48m to give ambulance trusts extra capacity this winter to respond to this pressure."

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