Union leader: Call in the Army to ease ambulance crisis in hospitals
The Army should be drafted in to help ease Scotland’s ambulance crisis while hospitals erect pop-up wards at accident and emergency departments, according to a union leader.
Jamie Mcnamee, Unite convenor at the Scottish Ambulance Service, called for major incident procedures to be triggered in order to increase resources. Last week Unite claimed patients are now waiting an average of six hours for an ambulance, and that some patients are waiting for up to 24 hours for a hospital bed.
Mcnamee said crews were waiting up to three hours in Aberdeen and Glasgow to hand patients over to overworked hospital staff. He said: “Regularly we have
ambulances queuing at facilities throughout Scotland.
“Our first option would be to initiate internal national risk and resilience procedures. That would entail building or producing popup wards outside the A&E departments that are unable to cope with demand, allow the crews to hand over the patients to these trained clinicians and free up that mobile asset to respond to 999 calls,” he said. Mcnamee told the BBC: “I believe the Army would have similar facilities that could come in helpful. I’m sure they’re busy themselves, however I think we find ourselves in a bit of a national crisis at the moment.”
Pauline Howie, chief executive of the Scottish Ambulance Service, has apologised, claiming staff are working under unprecedented pressure in response to an increase in non-covid and Covid cases. She insisted everything was being done to get people to hospital as quickly as possible.
We told in July how A&E doctors feared hospital wards were buckling under the strain because of staff shortages, absences because of Covid and rising numbers of patients. They told of patients waiting for up to 12 hours for a bed while others were forced to wait outside in ambulances. Since then, several health boards have warned of rising Covid cases putting severe pressure on their services. NHS Highland said it was having to return to prioritising vital care and treatment, such as emergency admissions and cancer care.
NHS Grampian said Covid patients were up more than 40% in a week while NHS Fife, NHS Ayrshire & Arran and NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde have postponed non-urgent surgery.
At First Minister’s Questions last week, Nicola Sturgeon said the average wait for life-threatening incidents was nine minutes and 30 seconds and “not good enough”.
The Scottish Government said: “It is vitally important there are no unnecessary delays for ambulances taking patients to hospital and we continue to work closely with the service and with health boards across Scotland.”