Ambulance targets missed in Worcestershire as one patient waits 11 hours to be seen
Figures show ambulances take twice as long to reach potential heart attack and stroke victims in Worcestershire than they should
Ambulances take twice as long to reach potential heart attack and stroke victims in Worcestershire as they should, figures show.
One patient was left waiting more than 11-and-a-half hours for an ambulance to show up.
The ambulance service says lengthy handover times at hospitals are having a direct impact on its ability to get to patients quickly.
The average response time for a Category 2 emergency call in Worcestershire is 37 minutes and 38 seconds – more than twice the 18-minute NHS target.
That’s according to data obtained by the Liberal Democrats via Freedom of Information requests to all 10 ambulance trusts in England.
Data from West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) also shows a failure to meet the target for Category 1 calls, which are people with life-threatening illnesses or injuries and should be responded to within seven minutes.
The figures show an average response time for the Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICS area of 10 minutes and 36 seconds.
One Category 1 patient had to wait an hour and 27 minutes while the longest wait endured by a Category 2 patient was 11 hours and 35 minutes.
A WMAS spokeswoman said: “We rely on each part of the health and social care system working together so that our ambulances can get to patients in the community quickly.
“If our crews are left caring for patients outside hospital, they are not available to respond to the next call as quickly as we would all want.
“There is a direct correlation between hospital handover delays and our ability to get to patients in the community quickly. Disappointingly, due to handover delays, our performance is not where we would want it to be.
“Unfortunately, these delays impact the care we are able to provide to patients, but it also affects our staff who often miss mealbreaks and regularly finish late which can have a significant bearing on their home life.
“We saw an improvement in hospital handover delays in February and March which, at the same time, led to a significant response in our category 2 performance.”
WMAS said it has the fastest call answering in the country and continues to work with all of its NHS and social care partners to look at new ways to improve response times.
Lib Dem health spokesperson, Daisy Cooper MP, said: “Under the Conservative Party the health service has faced unforgivable neglect and it is patients who are bearing the brunt.
“We urgently need investment in our ambulance services. For too long staff have not been given the resources they need and patients have been left to suffer unnecessarily.”
West Midlands Ambulance Spokesperson, Murray MacGregor, said: “I think the first thing to say is that our response times are very poor and it's one of the things that we're most concerned about. It's one of the reasons why the Trust Board has made it the highest risk rating of anything within the trust because we are so concerned about how it's impacting patients.
“We know from national data that patients are coming to harm as a result of hospital handover delays and that's because our ambulances arrive at hospital and they simply can't hand the patient over to the hospital staff. Because of that, they can't get out to the patient in the community and that puts that patient in some cases at risk of their condition becoming worse or worse, simply not getting there in time.
“When the handover delays come down, we get patients more quickly, so it's really clear that we need to work on hand over delays to allow us to get to patients more quickly.
“It's not just a hospital problem, it’s not just an ambulance problem, it's a whole system problem, and what we need to do is to work with all of the NHS and social care with the local authorities and voluntary sector to try and find solutions to these issues.”