The Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said this week that the number of hours ambulances spent waiting to offload patients in parts of England is “off the scale”.
BBC News reports that data shows ambulance waiting times in the South East rose by an incredible 36% in December, compared to the same month in 2019.
The figures show that on Monday this week, more than 700 patients were left waiting for an ambulance to arrive in London when none was available. This is also a worrying trend in the data, showing that patients are also facing unprecedented waits for ambulances to arrive with them initially.
The reports from BBC News show that South East Coast Ambulance service lost 7,803 hours queueing outside hospitals. This was an increase from 5.732 hours in 2019.
The issue is not that more ambulances are being called, it is the wait time outside the hospital when they arrive, and clearly this has a lot to do with pressures on NHS hospitals due to Covid-19.
A frightening reality is that the longer ambulances are waiting outside hospitals to offload patients, the less crews are available to respond to other emergencies. This is having a knock-on impact on ambulance arrival times.
Vice President of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, Adrian Boyle, was reported as saying services are facing a crisis unlike any other he has seen. He said:
“People feel they have a winter crisis every year but this is a different order of magnitude. This is the worse winter crisis I’ve been through in my 25 years of practising as a doctor.”
Ambulance services were reported to have responded to confirm they are doing everything possible to meet the demand.
Comment
Clearly, this is a dangerous situation and could well result in delays accessing treatment, which could in turn result in further injury or deteriorating illness, all leading to an increase in demand on hospital services. A vicious circle. How long can we continue like this?
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Danielle Young is a Senior Associate in our expert Medical Negligence team, which is ranked in tier one by the independently researched publication, The Legal 500,
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