999 patient is forced to wait 62 hours for an ambulance
‘Far longer than anyone would like’
A PATIENT was forced to wait 62 hours for an ambulance to respond to an emergency call, damning figures have shown.
And four of the country’s ambulance trusts have kept patients waiting for more than 24 hours over the past year.
The Welsh Ambulance Service recorded the longest delays, taking more than 50 hours to respond to 999 calls on four occasions over the course of a year.
This included the 62-hour wait for one person – whose identity is unknown – more than twice as long as the longest delay in any other NHS area. The Patients Association described the delays as ‘extremely concerning’.
Elsewhere, the East of England, South East Coast and South Central ambudemand lance services all recorded waits of more than 24 hours for the year to June 2018.
This included patients with breathing and mental health problems, according to figures obtained by the BBC with a Freedom of Information request.
New NHS response times introduced last year mean that the most serious calls should have a seven- minute response time, with a maximum of 15 minutes for 90 per cent of calls.
Ambulance services across England are struggling to cope with record and a recruitment crisis that has left a shortage of around 1,000 ambulance staff. Between 2015 and 2017, the number of 999 calls rose by 15 per cent to more than 10 million a year.
The trusts said the longest waits were for ‘less serious calls’, while they prioritised more serious ones. The Welsh Ambulance Service said it ‘ fully accepted’ that a number of patients waited ‘far longer than anyone would like’.
Stephen Clinton, assistant director of operations for the service, said: ‘These figures represent the extreme end of the waiting time spectrum and are neither typical nor do they explain the circumstances of these individual cases.’
He said some patients were already in the care of medical teams, while others were affected by extreme weather conditions.
Accident and emergency attendances could be cut by 6 per cent if patients were helped to manage conditions like asthma, diabetes and depression better. A study by the Health Foundation charity found 436,000 emergency hospital admissions and 690,000 A& E attendances could be avoided if patients received improved long-term support – saving the NHS £800million.