West Midlands ambulance staff working 15-hour days to cope with handover delays
AMBULANCE staff across Warwickshire are having to work up to 15-hour days due to ongoing delays in handing over patients at hospital.
And according to figures released by the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS), it also means the loss of around 125 ambulance shifts each day across the region with vehicles stuck outside A&E departments.
Government guidelines say patients should be handed over to hospital staff within 15 minutes of an ambulance arriving at A&E but figures show that is rarely the case and there are fears that as many as 32,000 hours could be wasted during December – historically a busy time for admissions with many hospitals putting winter emergency plans in place. In November, the figure was 27,449 hours.
A West Midlands Ambulance Service spokeswoman said: “Firstly, we are doing everything we can to get to patients in the community as quickly as we can.
“However, we are seeing some patients wait a very long time for ambulances to arrive as a result of long hospital handover delays. The pressures we are seeing in health and social care means that when our crews arrive at A&E they are unable to handover patients to hospital staff and therefore cannot respond to the next patient in the community.
“If there are long hospital handover delays, with our crews left caring for patients that need admitting to hospital, they are simply unable to respond to the next call, which can impact on the care of the patient in the community.
“We continue to work with all of our NHS and social care partners to prevent hospital handover delays, looking at new ways to safely hand over patients quickly so that our crews can respond more rapidly and save more lives.”
The spokesman explained that the impacts of such delays were three-fold. Firstly, it meant crews were delayed getting to calls and although they tried their best to respond to category one emergencies such as cardiac arrests, the impact on category two calls for things like heart attacks and strokes had been profound. There is an even greater issue with lower category calls such as falls, which are not life threatening.
The second impact is on the patients when they get to hospital with elderly patients developing pressure sores if left on a stretcher for many hours.
Finally, there is the impact that delays have on staff with the usual 12-hour shifts often extended to 13, 14 or 15 hours. This then has a knock-on effect as ambulance staff need to have at least 11 hours between shifts resulting in a delayed start for their next one – a double whammy for the service. There is also the mental health impact of sitting around outside a hospital while hearing calls for crews to go to critically unwell patients.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak said the government will ‘keep a close eye’ on ambulance delays and announced £1bn of extra funding.
He said: “It will be going on things like expanding A&E departments, putting more ambulances on the road and, crucially, discharge and the social care sector so that people can go back to their homes, back to their local communities once they’ve finished being in hospital. We can free up that capacity to treat urgent patients.
“All of that is making a difference and we’ve seen considerable improvements since this time last year, but obviously we’ll keep a close eye on it and work closely with the NHS to deliver everyone the care that they need.”
Locally, WMAS has recruited more staff and has taken on several hundred student paramedics. In addition, extra clinical staff are now working in the control rooms so that more calls can be dealt with over the phone.
