Fury of ambulance chiefs over 9-hour ‘gridlock’ to access A&E
SOARING numbers of patients are being forced to wait in ambulances outside hospital A&E departments amid what health officials call a deadly “epidemic” of delays.
A Daily Telegraph investigation reveals record waiting times in casualty units as patients spend up to nine hours in ambulances or with paramedics in corridors before a doctor or nurse can see them. Emails seen by this newspa- per reveal that orders have been given to abandon patients in hospitals after 30 minutes, so that paramedics can return to their duties.
Last night, one of Britain’s most senior A&E doctors warned that hospitals had reached “gridlock” with patients “crammed in like sardines” and safety at risk.
Official guidelines state that the hand-over from ambulance to hospital should take no longer than 15 minutes. But Freedom of Information (FoI) disclosures show that the number of patients subject to longer delays has risen by 64 per cent in just two years, with almost 400,000 cases in 2015-16.
The emails disclose fury among ambulance trust chief executives at the “unacceptable risks” posed to patients. They said 999 response times were deteriorating because paramedics were forced off the roads for long periods to care for patients outside A&E.
In one message, the head
of East of England Ambulance Service Trust (EEAST), Robert Morton, said hand-over delays were at “epidemic proportions” with a “completely unacceptable” impact on 999 performance.
Mr Morton told NHS chief executives in Essex, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and East Anglia that the time was coming when paramedics will be forced to abandon patients after 30 minutes. His message, sent last March, was met with anger from hospital bosses, who said A&E performance was “on a knife edge” and that abandoning patients would not help.
In another email, the head of the South Central Ambulance Service – which covers Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire – tells one hospital chief executive that delays at the Portsmouth Hospital trust “exceed acceptable levels”. The warning describes “grave concern” about the consequences for 999 response times.
The disclosures from the country’s 10 ambulance trusts reveal record delays at hospitals across the country. More than 10,000 patients waited at least two hours before hand-over to a casualty unit in 2015-16 – a fivefold rise in just two years.
More than 400 waits lasted more than four hours, including delays of more than nine hours in March at Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Woolwich, east London, and a hold-up of eight hours, 37 minutes at Southport District Hospital, Merseyside, in July.
Dr Chris Moulton, vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said: “The flow in hospitals has become gridlocked ... you’ve got all these ambulances waiting at hospitals, patients stuck on trolleys for 12 hours, crammed in like sardines.”