East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) executives gathered for their first board meeting of 2026 on Tuesday (January 12) to discuss the trust’s recent performance, with some improvements noted.
Board papers revealed EMAS had lost more than 109,000 hours in handover delays between April 2025 and November 2025 – this refers to how long it takes EMAS staff to formally hand a patient’s care over to A&E staff.
The national standard for patients to be fully transferred from an ambulance to an emergency department is 15 minutes – EMAS records its lost hours within ‘pre-handover’ time that has gone above 15 minutes.
While EMAS has lost more than 109,000 handover hours, this is an improvement on the same time period in 2024, where around 123,000 hours were lost.
Within the current 109,000 service-wide figure, the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, run by Nottingham University Hospitals Trust (NUH), accounts for more than 18,600 hours of it – meaning Nottingham’s A&E department has lost the second-highest amount of handover hours in the region between April and November 2025.
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Leicester Royal Infirmary has lost the most handover hours, at more than 20,700, and Royal Derby Hospital ranks third, with more than 13,549 lost hours.
QMC has dealt with sustained high numbers of patients in its emergency department, which was originally designed for 350 patients daily, recently it has seen more than 500 patients daily in its A&E – a department originally designed for 350 daily patients – and in under three months, NUH has declared two critical incidents due to service demand.
November 2025’s critical incident saw 24 EMAS ambulances waiting outside the emergency department, and a further incident was declared on January 13, 2026, with ‘pressures never seen before’, as more than 500 patients were going through its emergency department each day.
These recent periods of heightened service demand at Nottingham hospitals have had a direct impact on how quickly EMAS staff have been able to transfer patients into Nottingham’s A&E.
However, the implementation of the Release to Respond scheme at QMC around December 11, 2025 – an initiative where ambulance staff must hand over patients within 45 minutes – has brought handover delay times down recently.
In November 2025, more than 3,200 handover hours were lost at QMC, but this dropped to 2,342 hours lost in December overall – showing some success in the 45-minute handover initiative. Speaking about service-wide handover improvements at Tuesday’s board meeting, Ben Holdaway, Director of Operations at EMAS, said:
“Once Release to Respond came in around December 11 in four [hospital] trusts, and another the week after, our performance dropped to around 30 minutes.
“The plan was 33 minutes 47 seconds. Although we didn’t do it for a full month, from the 11th [December] onwards, when Release to Respond came in, we delivered at 32 minutes 41 seconds, so within plan.”
