FOI reveals thousands face long waits in ambulances outside of A&E

Thousands of patients across the South East were caught in queues of ambulances outside of A&E last year.

Some patients waited over four hours to be admitted with over 39,500 patients in ambulances waited too long to enter A&E in the South East last year.

A Freedom of Information request by the Labour Party has revealed that in 2013/14, 34,102 ambulances were delayed for more than 30 minutes and a further 5,448 faced waits longer than one hour.

In the South East Coast Ambulance Service area – which covers Brighton & Hove, East Sussex, West Sussex, Kent, Surrey, and North East Hampshire – 25,298 patients had to wait over 30 minutes, 3,047 had to wait over an hour. The longest wait was 4hrs 15minutes.

Meanwhile the risk management papers for the service reveal fears the hold ups “delay the availability of crews to respond to new incidents, some of which will be life threatening.”

The “handover delays” occur when ambulance crews cannot transfer a patient to the A&E department because of staff or bed shortages. New arrivals should enter the hospital within 15 minutes and the ambulance trusts record delays in excess of 30 minutes.

Hospital and ambulance chiefs warned in internal documents over the period that the growing trend puts a patient’s clinical care at risk and prevents ambulances from responding to subsequent emergency calls.

Nancy Platts, Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven said: “Let’s be clear, ambulance crews are not at fault here, but long waits to handover patients is keeping them from responding to other emergencies in Brighton and Hove. They need to be able to do their job and be available to help people who are sick and injured. It’s time the Government woke up to this A&E crisis and put patient care first.”

Jamie Reed MP, Labour’s Shadow Health Minister, added: “Under David Cameron, hospitals are full to bursting and he’s forcing ambulances to queue at the doors for hours on end.

“Thousands of vulnerable people, many of them elderly and frightened, are being wrongly held in the backs of ambulances because hospitals don’t have the space. And yet Ministers deny that A&E is in crisis.

“People know from their own experience that the NHS is heading downhill on David Cameron’s watch. It is clear the Tories can’t be trusted with it.”