Patients left waiting for hours on end
PATIENTS have been left waiting for hours on end in ambulances before being admitted to Leicestershire hospitals.
Exclusive figures reveal one patient in November 2018 waited in an ambulance for eight hours and 56 minutes from arriving at Glenfield General Hospital before they were handed over to A&E staff.
This was the worst wait recorded by East Midlands Ambulance Service last year, according to figures revealed following a Freedom of Information request.
There were 13 patients at Leicestershire hospitals who faced waits of more than four hours outside A&E last year. That was up from seven in 2017/18.
The figures included a wait of eight hours and 35 minutes at Glenfield General Hospital in April 2018, and one of seven hours and 34 minutes at the same hospital in November 2018.
Overall, 3,384 ambulance arrivals at Leicestershire A&Es took more than an hour to handover in
2018/19.
This was up from 3,174 in 2017/18, although it was down from 6,072 in 2016/17.
Ambulances are supposed to hand over patients within 15 minutes of arriving at A&Es - so patients can be treated in hospital rather than in the back of an ambulance, and crews can attend their next call.
Fewer than half of ambulance arrivals at Leicestershire A&Es were able to handover patients within 15 minutes in 2018/19.
However, this was up from 35.9 per cent in 2017/18.
A third of handovers (33.6 per cent) took between 15 minutes and 30 minutes, while one in eight (12 per cent) took between 30 minutes and an hour.
However, there is considerable variation between hospitals in terms of the lengths of waits faced by patients.
At Leicester Royal Infirmary, 51 per cent of handovers took place in 15 minutes in 2018/19, while it was just 31.6 per cent at Leicester General Hospital.
At Leicester General Hospital, one in five handovers (18.6 per cent) took between 30 minutes and an hour, the highest proportion locally
Leicester Royal Infirmary saw 3,142 handovers take more than an hour in 2018/19 (4.6 per cent), up from 2,894 in 2017/18.
Concerns about long handover times delaying ambulance responses - as crews are waiting at A&Es rather than able to respond to calls - have been raised by coroners following inquests as potentially putting patients at risk.
As part of its Long Term Plan, NHS England is committed to working with ambulance services to eliminate hospital handover delays.
It has issued guidance to ambulance services, hospitals and primary care services to better monitor levels of demand in order to better manage them.
Where handovers take more than 30 minutes, they should be escalated to on-call hospital director so immediate action can be taken to release ambulance resources.
For delays over one hour, the oncall CCG director and on-call NHS England director must be contacted to escalate the response further.
Handover times across England have improved in the past year.
In 2018/19, half (50.4 per cent) of handovers took place within 15 minutes, up from 43.5 per cent in 2017/18.
The number of longer waits have also dropped.
There were 308 waits of more than four hours across England in 2018/19, down from 558 in 2017/18. The total number over one hour has dropped from 135,117 to 86,835.