Over the festive period, hundreds of London patients were left waiting in ambulances for over an hour before being admitted to hospital. According to recent government data, there were 15,029 ambulance arrivals at both emergency and non-emergency departments in the capital during the week ending December 29.
Of these, 333 – or 2 per cent – experienced waits of over an hour, with London’s trusts performing much better than the national average. Across England, one in eight (13 per cent) ambulance arrivals – equating to 12,229 patients – faced handover delays of over an hour in the same week. On average, patients arriving by ambulance at London’s trusts waited 27 minutes, compared to a national average of 37 minutes.
Vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), Dr Ian Higginson, pointed to the ‘quademic’ of winter illnesses as being partially to blame for the dramatic rise in hospital admissions – and knock-on impact on ambulance services. In an interview with Sky News, he said: “We simply don’t have enough beds in our hospitals for patients who are admitted as emergencies. We don’t have enough staff for those beds and we don’t have any headroom at all. So if something like flu hits as it has done, it makes a bad situation even worse.”
Meanwhile, thousands of patients are occupying hospital beds longer than necessary. On December 29, 16,313 patients across NHS hospitals in England were deemed fit for discharge. However, only a third (5,135) were actually sent home, leaving 11,178 patients (68 per cent of the total) unnecessarily occupying hospital beds.
In London, the situation mirrors this, with a total of 2,018 patients deemed fit enough to be discharged on December 29. However, only 623 of these (31 per cent) were actually sent home. The lowest discharge rate was recorded at St George’s University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, where 11 per cent of patients ready for discharge were allowed to return home.
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