NHS ambulance trust lost 12k hours to handover delays in one week

An ambulance trust says more than 12,000 hours were lost in handover delays in one week.

The South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said the figure from September was the "highest level of resource hours lost in a single week" in its history.

In 2020, the trust was losing less than 500 hours-a-week to handover delays.

SWASFT has now released plans which aim to "significantly" reduce delays as some waiting times begin to come down.

A spokesperson for the trust said its staff "strive every day to give their best" but its performance had not returned to pre-pandemic levels, partly due to handover delays at emergency departments.

"We are working with our partners in the NHS and social care, to do all we can to improve the service that patients receive," they added.

The report, published by the trust on Thursday, comes as thousands of ambulance workers across England and Wales are set to go on strike on Wednesday in a dispute about pay.

In 2020, SWASFT was able to deliver Category 2 mean response times of less than 30 minutes.

Category 2 two calls are judged "urgent" and the mean response target is 18 minutes for all trusts.

But in the week commencing 26 September, the response times to these calls was almost two hours.

The trust said there was a "close correlation between ambulance hours lost and response times".

SWASFT - which serves 5.5 million people - said there had been "some improvements seen across October and November in comparison to the peak position seen at the end of September".

In a bid to improve on this, the trust's commissioners have shared steps to reduce the weekly time lost to handover delays to around 2,600 hours a week by March 2023.

This would "still be significantly higher than historic levels, but a substantial improvement on the current position," the report said.

Areas that have already improved include Gloucestershire, which has seen mean Category 2 response times on certain days fall close to 25 minutes, compared to over an hour at their peak.

The trust said it was "placing more ambulances on the road than ever before".

It is also recruiting for call takers for its emergency operation centres and is "continuing to work hard on triage to reduce the number of patients we take to hospital," the trust said.

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