AN ambulance service is being put “under pressure” due its vehicles waiting outside some hospitals, a meeting has heard.
Members of the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) board revealed their thoughts on the amount of time that their staff have to wait outside emergency departments.
The University NHS Foundation Trust’s board heard that there are some “very, very good” examples of hospitals, but overall the West Midlands “remains the worst affected by handover delays in the country by far”.
Dr Richard Steyn, the WMAS executive medical director, told the meeting that in January alone more than 50,000 ambulance hours were lost in waiting to offload patients.
He said:
“There has been a huge amount of pressure on us to think about how we park ambulances outside by parking at a distance and creating more parking spots for ambulances because of the fumes.”
Aidan Brown, the service transformation and patient safety director, added:
“There are some areas of improvement but we still remain the worst affected by handover delays in the country by far.”
The meeting was told that WMAS is again budgeting for 400,000 lost hours outside hospitals next year.
The service serves a population of six-million people in Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Coventry, Birmingham and the Black Country conurbation.
Dr Steyn also revealed that a target of offloading ambulances in an average of 45 minutes is a “long way off” – but he added that it is a “very poor measure” when some patients wait up to seven or eight hours.
With new rules coming into force covering so-called ‘corridor care’, WMAS chief executive Anthony Marsh said:
“There shouldn’t be a trade off with patients waiting in ambulances or in corridors, but that is the reality of life in many hospitals.
“What we don’t want to see is corridor care exported into car park care. It is not something that we would find acceptable.”
The board was told that the trust is doing better than national targets for getting to category two emergency calls – serious situations that are not immediately life-threatening – despite ambulances being held up at hospitals.
Mr Marsh said the service will end the year on a 24 and a half minutes response time, beating an agreed target of 28 minutes.
He said this was due to the “extraordinary efforts of everyone in our organisation”.
