‘WE KNOW FOR A FACT WE ARE CAUSING HARM’
Fears for patients over ambulance delays – which look set to get worse over winter
REGIONAL ambulance chiefs have placed the organisation on its highest ever risk alert amid fears more people face ‘catastrophic harm’ because
999 help can’t get to them quickly enough.
Paramedics are being stranded for hours at a time outside A&E departments, unable to off-load their patients and get back on the road because of a lack of space, beds and resources in hospitals.
At least eight patients waiting for emergency help have already died across the West Midlands in the last three months as a result.
And the situation is likely to get worse through winter without radical action, the West Midlands Ambulance Service board heard.
It comes as The Sentinel revealed yesterday that more than 600 ambulances faced hour-long delays while handing over patients at the Royal Stoke last month.
New figures show there were 618 ambulance handover delays of 60 minutes or more at the hospital’s emergency department during September – equating to more than 20 a day.
And an inquest this week, heard that paramedics found Shaun Mansell dead in his Packmoor home after taking more than eight hours to respond to a 999 call.
Professor Ian Cummings, chairman of the West Midlands Ambulance Service, said: “This takes us into a place we have never been before.
“Despite everything we are doing by way of mitigation, we know that patients are coming to harm as a result of delays in getting to them, some are dying before we get to them. This is a completely unacceptable situation.”
The Trust serves 5.6 million people across more than 5,000 square miles.
And pressure is now mounting on hospital trusts and health leaders across the region to come up with more solutions, especially in light of a new directive issued by NHS England telling them to ‘immediately’ stop the delays.
Hospitals have also been told they cannot put patients into corridors.
Mr Cummings said the biggest risk was to those who couldn’t get an ambulance in time. He added: “The patients in our care, in the back of one of our ambulances outside hospitals, are not ideally cared for but they are generally safe. But the risk is to those we cannot get to, who are waiting for us. They are the unknowns.”
Mark Docherty, the service’s director of nursing and clinical commissioning, said: “If you look at the trajectory of the delays into winter, it is only going to get worse.
“It is not possible to see how we will respond to some patients in a time-frame that is acceptable.”
This month, about one in 10 highrisk patients were not reached within two hours, he said. These would typically include suspected stroke and heart disease patients. “We know for a fact we are causing harm,” he warned.