Patients stranded in A&E ambulance queues for over two hours
Dec 7 2010 by Alison Dayani, Birmingham Mail
EMERGENCY patients have been left stranded in ambulances for over two hours outside Birmingham A&Es as bed-blocking and winter pressures reach crisis point.
A shock 339 ambulances were left queuing at hospitals on just one day across the region, new reports show.
The worst affected were Solihull Hospital, Sutton Coldfield’s Good Hope Hospital and Bordesley Green’s Heartlands Hospital, which is already on an official warning over taking too long to see emergency patients in A&E for the past three winters.
The situation was so bad that the West Midlands accounted for more than half of all ambulance turnaround delays – the time to drop off a patient with a medic and leave – in the UK on November 2. It comes as bed-blocking in the region, when mainly elderly healthy patients take up a hospital bed because social workers have not found them anywhere to go, is ranked the worst in the country of 16.5 per 100,000 people, compared to the national average of 9.1.
Birmingham City Council is already carrying out an inquiry into the issue as costs are spiralling. Phil Milligan, performance director for NHS West Midlands health authority, said there were 121 ambulances queuing at least 30 minutes at Heart of England Trust, in charge of Heartlands, Good Hope and Solihull hospitals, with one patient waiting more than two hours to get into A&E and 15 patients stranded between one and two hours.
New Cross Hospital in Wolverhampton had 44 ambulances queuing with five between one and two hours. “The daily report shows eight hospitals with significant numbers of ambulances with turnarounds between 30 and 60 minutes,” said Mr Milligan. “While Heart of England Foundation Trust and Wolverhampton’s New Cross had turnarounds of over an hour.”
Claire Thomas, spokeswoman for West Midlands Ambulance Service, said reasons for long waits were because hospital bosses were struggling to find beds for patients.
