Ambulance bosses say hospital handover delays reached the second-highest levels ever recorded last month.
In November, East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) crews lost a total of 22,590 hours while waiting to hand over their patients outside hospitals across the region.
This was the second-highest number of hours lost on record and marked a 75 per cent increase compared to November last year.
During a service board meeting on Tuesday (3 December), Dr Nicole Atkinson, the service’s medical director, said:
“What we actually need to see is that sustainable picture across the winter.
“From our point of view, it is very much about informally and formally saying this is not acceptable from an EMAS perspective, but more importantly, for all those patients for whom the experience is dreadful – their outcomes are not what we would want to see.
“This is going to have to be a system response; it is not an EMAS-only response.
“From our perspective, the rhetoric is this is non-negotiable. Something needs to happen around this.”
EMAS Chief Executive Richard Henderson said he did not feel there had been a sufficient resolution to the problem after a “marked deterioration” in handover delays.
The service has increased its patient safety risk alert, which is used to identify and reduce risks of harm to patients, to the highest level.
He said collaborative winter plans from hospital trusts and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs), which commission services, had so far “not delivered.”
“I believe we need to write to the [health] systems,” he added.
“We need to outline the severity of the situation we are facing.”
On average, EMAS lost 754 hours every day to handovers longer than 15 minutes.
From 18 November onwards, the average increased to 983 hours per day, equating to roughly 82 ambulance shifts lost to delays each day.
Stuart Poynor, who recently joined EMAS as its new director of finance from the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Integrated Care Board (ICB), said he had been “shocked” by the demands faced by ambulance crews.
“I’ve been shocked by it, to be honest, in terms of the pressure in the system,” he said.
“There was one day where we had 127 ambulances all waiting at hospitals at the same time in the evening.
“Things like that resonate with me, and I don’t know how we would capture some of the individual stories behind the incidents and what it really means when you are waiting eight hours for a response.”
He added that the gravity of what EMAS is dealing with is difficult to convey through statistics.
Mr Poynor said the organisation aimed to break even financially, rather than produce a surplus, because it would not be “appropriate” to hold back resources from the front line in the current financial year.
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