Taxi will get you to A&E faster, patients told
Doctor says emergency services have ‘broken their commitment’ to send ambulances out in time
AS WAITING times in A&E hit record highs, patients have been urged by the head of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) to take a taxi to hospital instead of waiting for an ambulance.
Last month some 24,138 patients in England had to wait for more than 12 hours in A&E departments to be allocated a hospital bed – after a decision to admit them had been made. The number of 12-hour “trolley waits” is up from 22,506 in March, and the highest for any month, according to records that date back to August 2010.
NHS data show, however, that those waiting at least four hours for a bed declined to 131,905 in April, from an alltime high of 136,298 in March.
April’s average response time for ambulances dealing with the most urgent incidents – calls from people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries – was nine minutes, two seconds, a slight improvement on March when the average response time was nine minutes, 35 seconds, the longest wait since records began in August 2017.
Response times to category-two emergency calls, when paramedics are called to incidents involving burns, epilepsy and strokes, averaged 51 minutes, 22 seconds in April, down from 61 minutes, three seconds in March.
Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the RCEM, said the pressure on emergency care was “more serious than we’ve ever seen it”. For the first time in her 20-year career, emergency services had “broken the commitment” to get an ambulance to a patient in a timely manner, she added.
Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if the public should be worried about whether an ambulance would reach a loved one in good time, she said: “I would be worried whether it’d be possible to get an ambulance to them in a timely way, I’d be looking very carefully at what alternatives I had.”
Asked if those “alternatives” included traveling by taxi or taking a patient to hospital oneself, she said “exactly”.
“At the moment we are seeing an increasing number of patients who are making their own way to hospital, which means that our walk-in queue is now no longer patients who managed to walk in,” she added.
“They may be patients who should have come by ambulance, so that makes it more difficult for us to know who’s in the queue [and] how [seriously ill] those patients are.” Emergency departments were “absolutely packed”, she said, and doctors “can’t get flow out”.
NHS England said more 999 calls were answered last month than in the same month for all previous years on record, and A&E departments had their second busiest April on record. It added that bed capacity was “constrained” last month by the average of more than 12,000 beds that were occupied by patients who could not be discharged due to a lack of social care placements.
Analysis by The Daily Telegraph found that at the end of April an average of 57.9 per cent of patients in hospital every day, were fit to be discharged.
The number of people in England waiting for routine procedures, such as hip replacements and cataract surgery, was 6.4 million at the end of March, up from 6.2 million in February and the most since records began in 2007.
The NHS England figures, published yesterday, also reveal that 16,796 people had been waiting more than two years to start routine hospital treatment at the end of March, down 28 per cent from 23,281 at the end of February.
Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at The King’s Fund think tank, said that until the Government “grasps the nettle” on health and social care staff shortages, patients will be left waiting in “discomfort, pain and deteriorating health”.