Ambulance handover delays worsening across region

West Midlands Ambulance Service has said delays outside hospitals in the region are getting worse and "patient harm is undoubtedly happening as a result of it".

Aidan Brown, its service transformation and patient safety director, said in September alone ambulances lost 32,810 hours (3.7 years) sitting outside hospitals in the region with patients in the back.

He also told an ambulance board meeting the winter is "likely to see significant further deterioration".

Board members were told ambulance chief executive Anthony Marsh had written to NHS leaders about his "significant concerns".

Brown said that at the end of the last financial year "many of us were hopeful, optimistic that things were starting to improve," but instead the situation had worsened.

There were some exceptions and the board noted the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust had shown a "sustained improvement" in its handover performance.

The ambulance service serves six million people and takes patients to 17 full emergency departments.

The figures shown to the board meeting revealed that in September only 28.5% of handovers were completed within 15 minutes while 22.7% exceeded one hour.

In the first six months of this financial year, the ambulance trust said it had lost the equivalent of 18.2 years in hospital handover delays.

The board meeting heard delays were reaching levels only previously seen in 2022 - the worst year for handover delays on record.

Despite this, it said it had recorded "strong" improvements in the time its crews take to respond to Category Two calls that are not immediately life-threatening.

The national target for those calls is to reach patients within 18 minutes, and the service said it was getting there in an average of 24 minutes 29 seconds - ahead of its expectations.

Response times to more serious category one calls were much faster, it said.

This news was gathered by the Local Democracy Reporting Service which covers councils and other public service organisations.

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