Scarborough second for longest ambulance wait time in Yorkshire
We submitted a Freedom of Information request to Yorkshire Ambulance Service
We can reveal the second longest ambulance wait time in Yorkshire over the last three months was at Scarborough Hospital.
It is after we submitted a Freedom of Information Request to Yorkshire Ambulance Service.
The NHS Trust there confirmed that it holds the following information, with handover times in HH:MM:SS
- York Hospital - 13:53:40
- Scarborough Hospital - 13:34:32
- York Hospital - 13:18:52
- York Hospital - 12:24:58
- York Hospital - 12:16:00
- York Hospital - 11:43:00
- Hull Royal Infirmary - 11:31:00
- Scunthorpe General Hospital - 11:18:37
- Hull Royal Infirmary - 10:17:05
- Hull Royal Infirmary - 10:11:00
Sir Robert Goodwill, the MP for Scarborough and Whitby, said: "That's an unacceptable wait not just of the point of view of the patient in the ambulance or the patient in A&E waiting with the ambulance crew, but also for the fact we can't then get an ambulance out and deployed ready to get more patients. It's a very complex subject.
"The time that I had spent a day with paramedics did surprise me a little that we took a patient in who wasn't particularly ill, but had to be checked over in A&E and we had to wait with that patient until he was handed over.
"I had a meeting with the Chief Executive of York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foudnation Trust, Simon Morritt, who said they're now enabling one ambulance crew to maybe supervise more than one patient so the others can get back out. Ultimately the problem with the log jam is that they can't get a GP appointment and therefore a lot of people who go to A&E are people who aren't an accident or emergency, they're just people who need to go and see their GP.
"We need to do whatever we can to ensure that the pressure is taken off A&E and part of that is ensuring that we can get better access to GP appointments and there's some quite complex reasons behind that. I mean GPs don't actually work for the NHS, they're all contracted.
"The hospitals are being squeezed from both ends. They're being squeezed in A&E from people who can't get a GP appointment and then the other end when it comes to admitting people to the wards by people who actually don't need to be in hospital, they need to be discharged but we can't get the right setting to discharge them to."