All ambulance trusts in England were put on the highest alert on Tuesday amid long waiting times of many hours in some cases as ambulances queued up outside hospitals unable to hand over patients. MailOnline has more.
Rising Covid staff absences, the escalating heatwave and ongoing delays in handing over patients to A&E have heaped extra pressure on ambulance services which were already in crisis mode.
All 10 trusts have been put on a level four alert known as Resource Escalation Action Plan (REAP) 4, which signals they are under “extreme pressure”.
As part of this, patients with emergencies that are not life threatening could be told to make their own way to hospital or seek alternative care – or face even longer waits than usual…
It comes amid a fifth wave of Covid infections across Britain, with 2.7 million (one in 24) people estimated to have been infected in the most recent week.
The rise of two mild but highly infectious Omicron sub-strains have caused daily Covid hospital admissions to rise to a near 18-month high, with around 2,000 people being hospitalised with the virus every day. But only a fraction of these are primarily sick with the virus…
South Central Ambulance Service trust has explicitly asked people in the lowest category of callouts to find “alternative treatment and advice” and to not call 999 back to ask about an estimated time unless the patient’s condition has changed.
The service said it was experiencing a growing number of 999 calls coupled with patients calling back about delayed responses.
Meanwhile, West Midlands Ambulance Service said it had been on the highest level of alert for a few months and told HSJ more than half of its ambulance crews were queued outside hospitals at one point yesterday.
A spokesman for the trust said one ambulance crew had to wait 24 hours to hand a patient over.
One senior leader in the north of the country, who asked not to be named, told HSJ the situation was ‘dire’ for both staff and patients…
Last month, the average category one response time was eight minutes and 36 seconds. This is 26 seconds faster than April but 96 seconds slower than the seven-minute target. Ambulances in May took an average of 39 minutes and 58 seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes. This is 11 minutes and 24 seconds quicker than one month earlier but more than double the 18-minute target. Response times for category three calls – such as late stages of labour, non-severe burns and diabetes – averaged two hours, nine minutes and 32 seconds. This is down from two hours, 38 minutes and 41 seconds in April. Ambulances are supposed to arrive at nine in 10 category three calls within two hours.
The wait outside hospitals to admit patients seems to be the crucial factor, as according to official data (see below) the actual number of 999 calls isn’t higher than normal, whereas the waiting times have been very high since last summer. This timing corresponds to when the wave of non-Covid excess deaths began in the second half of 2021, a worrying trend which has resumed this spring.
The long ambulance waits despite normal numbers of calls suggest that hospitals are lacking capacity to take patients, whether due to lack of beds or staff shortages. It seems likely that this ambulance crisis is linked to the very high numbers of non-Covid excess deaths that have been accumulating since last July. This all needs urgent investigation by the Government.
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My 11 year old daughter has just had her appointment at Leeds dental hospital cancelled.
Why? Because the doctor has been told he might develop the sniffles.
Waited about two months for this appointment. We weren’t offered a new appointment and have been told to start phoning up next week to check for his cancellations (when presumably he’ll be back at his desk), as they’re booked up for months.
Can’t these people just stop all this BS? ARE THEY REALLY SO STUPID AND/OR LAZY?
Give me the money and I’ll take it to the private sector, and pay for any difference myself. But this isn’t possible, is it?
Lazy
And entitled.….to dictate their own conditions of work, to expect a pay rise, to expect Joe Public to buy into the Covid shite, to prioritise their needs over others, to be seen as virtuous within their communities, to pass comment on those who disagree with them, to exclude those people from sections of society etc etc
Despite their behaviour, attitudes and just plain wrongness over these past 2 years, these medical class elites have no humility or shame, just a disgusting level of pure entitlement!
The answer lies in ourselves not in our stars, that we are underlings.
Simply pay for a private appointment. The tax is to pay for the establishment claque.
We get most of our dentistry done in Poland. Better, cheaper and much, much quicker.
I wouldn’t blame this on the doctor. I bet they have a workplace policy forcing everyone who might have COVID symptoms to stay away from the workplace for a certain time for health & safety reasons.
No, not blaming it on the doctor.
You may be interested in this video, which explains how Reform UK intends to clear NHS waiting list in 18 months. It’s just part of the reason why I’m working for the party now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT9TM858mR4
I hope you can stir things up.
All the best.
How many good staff did the NHS lose because they sensibly refused to take an experimental gene therapy they did not need? The public enquiry should be investigating this.
Masks – essentially single use
Tests – single use
Nightingale hospitals – essentially single use, although I don’t think they were ever used
Test and Trace – No longer in use
Just about all the money spent has been for one off items with no long term value.
Not only have we lost all that money but we’re now having to spend even more fixing the new problems that were caused.
It’s Summer, not a heatwave!
‘Rising Covid staff absences…’
Not CoVid, stupid.
Stop testing, stop self-isolating stop trying to stop the unstoppable and START living a normal life.
Agreed…and stop pretending a bit of paper/cloth with ear elastics can do anything useful!!
Minus polluting the environment, it can do something very much useful: It can be sold.
I can tell you what’s going on here. It’s really twofold: First, there’s an entirely NHS-made admission crisis because nobody’s going to be admitted without a prior COVID test. That’s a bottleneck everybody has to pass through and as NHS management still believes its main purpose is preventing Sars-CoV2 infections, that’s really bad for people who are actually in need of medical help. Second, yesterday, a government junior ministor went on record stating that Corona measures may be reintroduced to save the NHS one more time. Obviously, this has caused the state of it to become much more dire overnight.
Something I fondly remember from reading about the so-called Elizabethan poor laws was that poor people willing to work were to be given financial support if necessary while those unwilling to were to be flogged through the streets until they saw the error of their ways. This method could perhaps also be applied to NHS managers who still prefer playing politics over treating patients.
Fully deserved recipients of the George Medal
for services to absenteeism 
Waited 1 1/2 hours for an ambulance when I found my upstairs neighbour on the floor, three days after a hip op. Her b/p bottomed out and she passed out, cracking her head on the dining room table on the way down.
last night, three ambulances and two helicopters and police responded within minutes when an accident occurred at the circus in town. Now I have to ask, surely a health and safety assessment was carried out before a permit was issued to the circus. You know, things like the availability of emergency services in the event of a serious accident to performers or spectators. Since there is a “black alert” here in Devon, the answer is emergency services are NOT available in the unlikely event of a serious injury to performer or spectator, or heart attack victim, or anyone else. why was the event allowed to take place for well over a week.