The NHS has broken its “fundamental promise” to the public to have life saving emergency care when they need it, a top NHS doctor has said as ambulances lose tens of thousands of hours outside hospitals.
Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has said the “fundamental promise” the NHS holds to provide an ambulance in a real emergency is “broken.”
Her words come as West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) Trust has predicted it will lose 48,000 ambulance hours waiting outside of A&Es in July. This would be the worst month on record.
In papers published on Thursday, WMAS said the impact of handover delays means patients are waiting longer than needed for emergency responses, including patients in category one which are those needing immediate life saving care.
It added: “This means that patients who are immediately time critical medical emergencies do not get the response they need and may suffer significant harm or death”
According to the trust it has reported 262 cases of harm in 2022-23 so far. This is already up from 152 reported in the whole of 2021-22.
Between April and June the trust recorded 631 incidents of ambulances being delayed outside hospital for more than 20 hours.
The Independent understands on Thursday WMAS lost 2,000 hours outside of A&Es, its worst day since April. Last week the service lost 2,200 hours in one day.
Following predictions of the service losing 48,000 hours this month sources say on this trajectory by mid-august it would lose 60,000 hours accounting for 30 per cent of its total ambulance hours.
The predictions come after the service’s chief nurse Mark Docherty predicted the service would collapse by 17 August in an interview with the Health Service Journal last month.
Last week The Independent revealed reports from the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives stating almost 200,000 patients had come to harm over ambulance handover delays.
The warnings over ambulance service delays come as the NHS continues to face significant summer pressures. On Thursday all hospitals in Derby and Derbyshire declared a critical incident over “significant and sustained demand for urgent and emergency care services”.
Speaking with The Independent a paramedic in the East of England said: “Patients are dying waiting for ambulances. People with chest pains wait four hours most of the time and eventually stop breathing waiting for us. Often when we arrive it’s too late… Category one response times are awful. Currently, we have ambulances taking 45 mins in many areas to get there for these calls.”
The region said it has been forced to post-pone some non-urgent operations which would require a hospital bed, to accommodate patients with the most urgent needs.
Speaking at a patient safety event at the Kings Fund on Thursday, Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said: “At the moment we really are struggling to make any kind of progress in patient safety. That basic agreement that we have with the public that if something bad happens and you dial 999 and an ambulance will come a timely way – we’ve broken that promise. That fundamental promise we had, where you would go okay, I might be waiting for my hip replacement but at least they’ll be there for me in a real emergency.
“That situation is broken.”
Dr Henderson said core to what the NHS needs to do is to fix this issue which she described as “the biggest single patient safety, unknown, unknowns problem.”
“Those are patients in the community which we don’t know anything about. We don’t know what’s wrong, barring basic information. We’ve got to get the ambulance delay situation solved…It is core to providing a “decent” healthcare system,” she said.
