Home / Health / Ambulance Delays Worsen: Patient Harm Mounts
Ambulance Delays Worsen: Patient Harm Mounts
28 Oct
Summary
- Ambulance delays outside West Midlands hospitals are worsening.
- In September, ambulances lost over 32,000 hours to hospital waits.
- The situation is expected to deteriorate further this winter.
Ambulance handover delays outside West Midlands hospitals have escalated to critical levels, prompting serious concern about patient safety. In September, the service reported a staggering 32,810 hours lost to ambulances waiting with patients outside hospital facilities.
Officials expressed that the situation has worsened since the previous financial year, with projections indicating further deterioration this winter. These delays have reached levels not seen since the record-breaking year of 2022. Despite these significant challenges, the service has achieved strong improvements in response times for Category Two calls.
While the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust demonstrated sustained improvement in handover performance, overall figures reveal that in September, only 28.5% of handovers were completed within 15 minutes, with 22.7% exceeding an hour. In the first half of the current financial year, the trust lost the equivalent of 18.2 years to these hospital handover delays.
