Wait for ambulance? I’d rather take family to casualty in a taxi
Top health chief makes shocking confession...
A TOP emergency doctor has admitted she would consider ordering a taxi to reach A&E rather than dialling 999 for an ambulance.
Dr Katherine Henderson, the head of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said response times are now so bad she is ‘worried’ paramedics would fail to arrive fast enough.
She said: ‘This is more serious than we’ve ever seen it. We’ve never broken the commitment to being able to get an ambulance to a patient in a timely way.
‘It’s part of the NHS constitution that we will get care to emergency patients without unnecessary delay and this is the first time in my career over 20 years as a consultant, where that has become a serious issue.’
Asked if she would ‘fear’ for a loved one who needed to dial 999, she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘I would be worried whether it would be possible to get an ambulance to them in a timely way.
‘I would be looking very carefully at what alternatives I had. But we shouldn’t have to do that.’ Pushed on whether that meant ‘grabbing a taxi’ or driving themselves, she responded: ‘Exactly.’
Her comments come as figures from NHS England show the average ambulance response time for the most urgent incidents was 9 minutes and 2 seconds last month. The national target is seven minutes. Ambulances took an average of 51 minutes and 22 seconds to respond to calls for issues such as burns, heart attacks and strokes – well above the 18 minute target.
One in ten waited almost two hours. And the average time patients have to wait when dealing with conditions such as a late stage of labour or nonsevere burns is now 2 hours 38 minutes and 41 seconds.
Charities and think-tanks have warned emergency care is no longer safe and described the delays as ‘appalling’ and ‘frightening’. The long holdups affect survival chances and may lead to more severe disability if conditions such as strokes are not treated promptly, they added.
The number of serious safety incidents reported by ambulance staff in England has increased by 77 per cent over the past year.
And delays have already led to a rise in severely ill people making their own way to hospital when they would previously have been expected to arrive under blue lights.
A record 24,138 people had to wait more than 12 hours in A&E departments in England last month from a decision to admit to actually being admitted. The figure is up from 22,506 in March, and is the highest for any calendar month in records going back to August 2010.
Tim Gardner, from the Health Foundation think-tank, said: ‘Today’s figures are not normal for this time of year, when the warmer spring weather usually brings an easing of pressure on the NHS. The continued pressure on urgent and emergency care services is simply not safe nor sustainable.’
‘Appalling and frightening’