Ambulance delays putting West Midlands patients at "catastrophic risk"
Crews waited for a total of 16,000 hours outside local hospitals last month
Last updated 29th Oct 2021
Ambulance handover waiting times are at unseen levels, and are putting patients at risk in the West Midlands according to experts.
On Wednesday the West Midlands Ambulance Service board of directors took the decision to upgrade the handover delay "risk rating" to it's highest possible risk for the first time ever.
The knock-on effect of the waiting times is that ambulances aren't free to quickly respond to people in need of urgent medical care.
Last month alone crews waited for 16,000 hours across the region to handover patients. Outside the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital 1,375 hours were lost, while 768 were lost by crews waiting outside the Princess Royal.
Mark Docherty, director of nursing and clinical commissioning, warned that winter will stretch the service further. "Despite everything we are doing by way of mitigation, we know that patients are coming to harm as a result of delays.
“We know that there are patients that are having significant harm and indeed, through our review of learning from deaths, we know that sadly some patients are dying before we get to them.”
It’s almost like we are having to change our monitoring systems because some of the monitoring was never built to record delays in excess of 10 hours, for example, but we know there have been quite a number of them in the year to date.
“The impact of a 10-hour handover delay is that the crew going in won’t ever return back to their shift on the road to deal with patients that they would normally have dealt with.
“It’s massively impactful on our response times."
WMAS deputy chair Wendy Farrington-Chadd said it was “disappointing” that the board was left with no option but to declare the most serious level of risk.
She said: “I do think we should be pushing more for solutions. I know that we are doing, but it just feels that with the acceptance of this risk level it’s almost like it’s beyond our control and that doesn’t feel like the right place for us to be as a board.
“The whole point of risk is that you can in some way manage it, and what we are saying almost by this categorisation is there is no way and nothing else we can do. We need to focus on the solutions in this.
“It’s not acceptable for patients or staff, and I don’t see the long-term solutions that need to happen to change this in the dramatic way that would need to alter that position particularly in the short term.”