Dramatic rise in demand for services puts cash-starved health service on critical list DEADLY

NATHAN Phillips died of an asthma attack after waiting nearly an hour for an ambulance. He twice called 999 complaining he could not breathe. He died in the arms of his girlfriend as her sister drove him to hospital inApril 2015. An inquest into the 24- year-old’s death heard his call had, initially, not been categorised in the highest priority red, needing an eight minute response time. The decision was made by a computer based on his responses to the 999 call operator’s questions. When the call was finally upgraded to red it took ten more minutes to send an ambulance to Hattersley, Greater Manchester, where Nathan was visiting his gran. North West Ambulance’s John Kilroe told the inquest the Department of Health did not give enough funding to have ambulances available in all situations where they are needed. EACH day, seven critically ill patients wait more than an hour for an ambulance to take them to hospital. The shocking figure is revealed by a Sunday People probe into England’s crisis- hit ambulance service as it struggles to cope with a soaring number of calls. We discovered that response times in 2,746 of the highest priority “red” cases last year were more than 60 minutes. Calls are code red when a person’s life is in immediate danger, including if they have stopped breathing or have no pulse. NHS guidelines means 75 per cent of such cases should be reached within eight minutes. But the 2,746 figure, equivalent to more than seven calls a day, is likely to be even higher as it is data from just eight of England’s ten NHS ambulance trusts. In 2013 the number of red calls with one hour- plus responses was 1,797. The GMB union’s officer for the NHS, Sharon Holder, said: “When you dial 999 you hope an ambulance will turn up but this isn’t happening.

“We have a massively overstretched and underfunded ambulance service and the inevitable consequence is that patients are needlessly dying.

“If you don’t reach a patient within eight minutes either they won’t survive or it will have a huge impact on their chance of making the best recovery.

“Ambulance staff are doing their best but they are stressed and burntout and many are choosing to leave the ambulance service.”

But it is not just st critically ill patients suffering because cause of the problems. Our investigationestigation found in the past twowo years the number of non-lifeon-life threatening “green” een” calls which ambulance lance crews have taken more than four hours to respond to has also soaredoared from 10,991 to 20,769. 769.

Target times for or green calls are set et locally, with mostt ambulance services aiming to reach patients within 20 to 30 minutes. In Yorkshire last year a pensioner with traumatic back injuries after a fall waited nearly seven hours. A woman in her 20s had a five-hour wait after she was assaulted. In the East Midlands an ambulance took seven hours to reach an 89-yearold man who had fallen. A man of 48, who had also taken a tumble, waited nearly 11 hours. Meanwhile a 45-year-old man who attempted suicide was not seen by an ambulance crew until ten and a half hours after the 999 call was made. Shocking ambulance delays in the North East includ include a nine-hour wait by a diabeti diabetic woman with blood sugar pro problems and an eighthour w wait by a man who’d had a “probable stroke”. An Another alarming case invol involved a man in his 70s with spinal injuries who wait waited more than ten hour hours for South Central A Ambulance Service to s send a paramedic. Labour’s shadow health secretary Diane Abbott said: “We are the fifth biggest economy in the world. How can it be right for an 89-year-old man to wait seven hours for an ambulance? In some cases it will be the difference between life and death.

“This shambles is further proof that the Tories are running the NHS to the ground and putting lives at risk.”

Demand for emergency services is at an all-time high, with 10.8 million calls in England last year, a seven per cent increase from the previous year.

Frail

In May alone, 925,000 calls were handled by operators, an increase of 11 per cent from May 2015.

Ms Holder said ambulance response times were also being affected by the crisis in our A&E departments.

She said: “Ambulance crews are picking up patients and then finding themselves in huge queues outside A&E because of a lack of capacity in our hospitals.

“They are sitting in a queue and they can see the new calls starting to stack up but until they hand over the patient they can’t go anywhere.”

She said there needs to be more