Ambulance handover delays ‘put 57,000 patients at risk of harm’ last month
Thousands of people suffered harm as a result of delays in ambulances handing over patients to A&E teams in December, according to a report.
The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) said 6,000 people were estimated to have suffered “severe harm” as a result of ambulances being delayed at the doors of emergency departments for more than an hour last month.
As many as 57,000 experienced “potential harm” across England throughout December – an increase of 18,000 from the previous month.
The report states that longer patient handover delays reached unprecedented levels in December, with the 227,000 hours lost double the figure for the same month in 2021.
Official NHS data show the proportion of ambulance patients waiting at least 30 minutes to be handed to A&E teams was 44 percent in the week between Christmas and the new year – the highest on record.
Martin Flaherty, the AACE managing director, said: “Our December 2022 data for handover delays at hospital emergency departments shows some of the worst figures we have recorded to date and clearly underlines that not enough is being done to reduce and eradicate these dangerous, unsafe and harmful occurrences.
“At a national level, the average handover time has nearly doubled over the past 12 months, increasing from 29 minutes in December 2021 to 55 minutes in December 2022. However, it is particularly worrying that longer delays – those that continue over one, two and three hours – reached unprecedented levels in December.”
Chris Hopson, the chief strategy officer for NHS England, told the Commons health and social care committee on Tuesday: “We prepared for this winter – we prepared for it earlier than we had done before. The issue was always going to be this winter was the degree to which we saw prevalence of both Covid and flu and the degree to which they combined.”
