Ambulances will stop responding on Aug 17, says trust
Nursing director says delays are leading up to ‘Titanic moment’ for emergency services
AMBULANCES will be unable to respond to 999 calls by Aug 17, the nursing director of one ambulance service has warned, as the trust faces a “Titanic moment”. Mark Docherty, of West Midlands Ambulance Service, said patients were “dying every day” from avoidable causes created by ambulance delays and he could not see why NHS England and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) were “not all over” the issue.
He told Health Service Journal (HSJ) rising numbers of people were waiting in ambulances for 24 hours before admission to hospital, and serious incidents had quadrupled in the past year, largely because of severe delays.
Documents from the trust’s quality governance meeting in March showed another director saying “deaths are happening which should not be happening” and nationally, patients are being let down in a “catastrophic situation”.
The document noted more than 100 serious incidents recorded at West Midlands Ambulance Service related to patient deaths where the service had been unable to respond because ambulances were held outside hospitals.
England-wide NHS data for March showed ambulance trusts missing targets, including being too slow to respond to the most urgent incidents. Mr Docherty said: “Around Aug 17 is the day I think it will all fail. I’ve been asked how I can be so specific, but that date is when a third of our resource [will be] lost to delays, and that will mean we just can’t respond.
“Mathematically it will be a bit like a Titanic moment. It will be a mathematical [certainty] that this thing is sinking, and it will be pretty much beyond the tipping point by then.”
Jamie Rees, 18, died of cardiac arrest on New Year’s Eve 2021 in Rugby after delays meant paramedics took 17.5 minutes to reach him, instead of the target of seven. Mr Docherty will raise Rees’s case at a safety summit this week.
He told HSJ the number of medically fit patients occupying hospital beds was “criminal... When I’ve got teenagers dying on the street from things that are completely reversible”. Official figures show 62 per cent of patients in England who were medically fit to leave hospital on April 30 stayed stuck on wards.
Mr Docherty said he did not know “why the CQC is not all over this, I don’t know why NHS England is not all over this”.
An NHS spokesman said: “The NHS has been working hard to reduce ambulance delays and £150 million of additional system funding has been allocated for ambulance service pressures.”
Victoria Vallance, CQC’S director of secondary and specialist healthcare, told HSJ the impact of “escalating pressure on the NHS is severe” and the CQC will “continue to monitor services and use our regulatory powers where necessary”.