11 ambulances forced to queue at Labour-run Welsh hospital
PARKED side by side outside a Welsh A&E unit, 11 ambulances are forced to wait because casualty staff are too overwhelmed to accept patients.
The picture, taken outside Wrexham Maelor hospital, exposes the scale of the crisis in Wales’s Labour-run NHS – where waiting times are even longer than those in England.
Such scenes are by no means isolated, either, and on Monday there were 12 ambulances queuing outside the Heath hospital in Cardiff.
Andrew RT Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, blamed the crisis on a result of a ‘vicious cycle’ of under-funding by Labour.
‘Despite the best efforts of dedicated Welsh NHS staff, ambulance response targets have not been met in Wales for several years and A&E waits continue to worsen on Labour’s watch,’ he said.
The Mail last year revealed the scale of the NHS crisis in Wales, where patients have died on waiting lists and thousands are travelling to England for treatment.
But problems persist in England itself, and it emerged yesterday that a hospital in Sheffield has asked for help from the Red Cross – better known for helping Third World disaster victims. The charity is pro- viding two ambulances and a team of staff at the city’s Northern General, while bosses have also asked nurses in managerial roles to return to frontline duties. Backroom staff have been shifted on to wards to do admin jobs for nurses.
An unprecedented 13 English hospitals have declared major incidents as they struggle to cope, as A&E waiting times plunged to their worst in a decade and just 92.6 per cent of patients were treated within four hours. But the figure is even worse in Wales – at just 83.8 per cent.
Firemen have already warned that they were increasingly being asked to ferry patients to hospital instead of ambulances. It emerged yesterday that fire crews cut the ring off a stroke patient’s swollen finger because an ambulance was not expected for five hours.