We cannot go on with these long delays for emergency healthcare

TRURO Mayor’s Steven Webb’s 90 minute wait for an ambulance as he suffered a potentially life threatening condition is another example, in today’s Western Morning News, of the woeful state of emergency health care here in the South West.

As everyone stresses every time an incident like this occurs, no fault can be found with the health care professionals – just with the system that means they are struggling to provide an acceptable service for often desperately ill members of the public.

One of the most shocking aspects of these incidents – apart from the length of time that we and others have been reporting them – is the fact that every single time for the service involved, whether Ambulance Trust or NHS hospital A & E department, the explanation is almost always the same.

Bed blocking, in which elderly patients well enough to no longer need hospital care but too frail to be sent home without adequate support, is generally the root cause. It leaves ambulances backed up outside A & E units because there is no space for new patients to be admitted and it prevents patients requiring treatment from being shown a bed.

The health and social care system has now been under what the spokesmen and women for the services call “severe pressure” for so long it has become situation normal.

But it is not normal – or it shouldn’t be – for a man with a spinal injury like Truro Mayor Steven Webb to be left in fear for his life because his blood pressure is soaring and his heart rate dropping as he suffers an hour and a half wait for an ambulance to drive from Saltash to

Truro to take him to hospital.

As Mr Webb tells the WMN today, there was a time when you called an ambulance and the operator kept you on the phone while the paramedics made their way to your door in minutes. That’s the kind of service those suffering a real emergency had a right to expect. They should still expect it.

Measures have been put in place – belatedly – by ministers to invest in the social care system so that more elderly people can leave hospital, freeing up bed space for those in desperate need. But it is going to take time to grow the service to the point where it can properly take the strain. What happens in the meantime?

We accept that in recent years some people’s expectation of NHS care has become unreasonable and their demands impossible to meet. But they are in a minority. Most of us hold off calling for emergency help until there is no alternative; the majority heed the calls from NHS bosses to use services appropriately and avoid calling 999 or going to A & E unless it is absolutely vital.

But even taking those steps and being patient is clearly not enough. And while it is understandable that the same old reasons for delays are being trotted out, that’s not good enough either. Two things can happen here: the ambulance service and under pressure NHS Trusts can admit that in the current climate they are simply unable to meet demand in a timely way, or ministers can accept they must give the system an emergency injection of cash to ease the crisis. Letting things stay as they are cannot be an option.