By Thomas Moore, Health Correspondent
Ambulance services were forced to spend more than £5m hiring private crews and charities to cope with the winter A&E crisis as tens of thousands of hours were wasted queuing outside hospitals, a Sky News investigation has found.
Over the four weeks covering the last two weeks of December and first two weeks of January, some 1,780 days of operational time was lost because hospitals were too full to admit patients.
The 42,726 hours of delays are equivalent to taking 64 ambulances out of service at the same time.
On 11,203 occasions over that period crews waited more than an hour to hand over emergency patients, the figures show.
Patients experienced handover delays of more than half an hour 39,523 times.
One service said the delays its crews experienced were twice those of the previous winter.
As a result of the delays and the unprecedented pressure, services had to pay for private ambulances to respond to calls instead landing them with a bill of £3.79m.
They also spent £1.23m on charity-run ambulances such as Red Cross to help ease the crisis.
The figures were obtained by Sky News under Freedom of Information requests made to the 10 regional ambulance services in England.
When ambulances take patients to hospital, crews are supposed to be able to hand them over to staff in 15 minutes or less.
But delays take place when the hospitals are too busy or over-crowded to admit them.
Over the four-week period covered by the figures (from 15 December to 11 January), the West Midlands service recorded 9,874 hours of working time were lost due to delays in excess of a quarter of an hour.
In London, 6,833 hours were lost and in the East Midlands crews recorded 6,761 hours of delays.
In the Eastern region, patients were forced to wait in ambulances for more than an hour on 2,049 occasions, in the East Midlands 2,043 and in the North West 1,854 times.
During the period the South East Coast service spent £919,000 on paying for private ambulances and a further £74,000 to charities.
The London service spent £610,233 on private services and £109,118 on voluntary ones. In Yorkshire, £439,868 was spent on ambulances supplied by charities.
The apparently high use of private agency ambulance staff has raised concerns due to the cost and potential lack of experience among crews.
Christina McAnea, head of health at Unison, said: "Members sometimes tweet us photos of queues of ambulances outside A&E departments.
"That is such a waste of time and resources for very experience, qualified staff who could be out there helping patients if the rest of the system was running smoothly."
Neil le Chevalier, director of operations, South Western Ambulance Trust, said: "We are very much the sponge of the NHS.
"We absorbed a lot of the pressure. Compared to 2013 we saw double the amount of delays.
"If an ambulance is queuing in a hospital it can't be responding to emergency calls, so it is a very critical situation for us that we have to work through."
A spokesman for NHS England said: "There has been an unprecedented level of demand for all frontline services this winter, which has put every part of the NHS under pressure.
"We have invested over £48m to give ambulance trusts extra capacity this winter to respond to this pressure."
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Ambulance Services Spent £5m On Private Crews
Dengan url
http://juarapageone.blogspot.com/2015/03/ambulance-services-spent-a5m-on-private.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Ambulance Services Spent £5m On Private Crews
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Ambulance Services Spent £5m On Private Crews
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar