MSP hits out at waiting times
People in Rutherglen and Cambuslang are being left waiting in ambulances for hours on end – no matter which health board they come under.
A Freedom of Information request from Scottish Labour list MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy has revealed the waiting times for both NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have soared in recent years.
Ms Duncan-Glancy has now called for action to improve the situation, amid fears the stats will have worsened even more since they were compiled in July.
Patients going to Hairmyres
Hospital were stuck waiting for help outside the hospital in ambulances for up to almost five hours.
The data shows that ambulances waited for more than an hour to transfer sick patients to the hospital a shocking 504 times in the first half of 2021.
For Glasgow, the situation was little different.
Some patients at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital were left waiting outside in ambulances for up to four hours, with 3789 ambulances being left to wait for more than an hour before transferring sick patients.
And 320 of those ambulances waited longer than two hours before transferring patients inside.
Ambulance turnaround times record the length of time an ambulance takes to drop off a patient at a hospital and be ready to respond to another emergency call.
At the Queen Elizabeth, turnaround times have increased by 44 per cent over the past five years, while at Hairmyres the figures have jumped 75 per cent since 2014.
Ms Duncan-Glancy said: “These figures show just how badly Scotland’s growing ambulance
crisis is hitting people in Rutherglen.
“The problems have been building for years while SNP ministers buried their heads in the sand – and now things have escalated into a national emergency.
“Pandemic or no pandemic, no-one should be stuck outside a hospital waiting almost five hours for urgent help.
“We have a unique situation in Rutherglen, with two large hospitals close by each other,
but that is little comfort for local people when they can clearly see from these figures that both of these local hospitals are at crisis point.
“NHS staff, paramedics, and call-handlers are working tirelessly to get people the care they need, but they are being failed too. The SNP need to get to grips with this crisis before any more lives are lost.”
Earlier last week the Deputy First Minister, John Swinney, discussed the ambulance crisis.
He said: “We have to have whole-system solutions in place. It’s about boosting social care capacity, so people are better supported in their own homes and have less need to use the ambulance service.
“Or about ensuring we have improvements in the level of delayed discharges, so our hospitals are less congested – and crucially, that we can make sure people have a swift journey through accident and emergency when they require to be there.”