East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) reports losing 134,000 hours over the course of a year due to delays in handing over patients.
Officials claim the hours were lost between April 2023 and March 2024, but maintain they are working hard with system partners to reduce the negative impact of the delays, writes Local Democracy Reporter James Turner.
EMAS insisted that it continues to face “tremendous pressure” and acknowledged that ambulance wait times across the region are far from ideal. However, it feels that recent recruitment efforts have helped.
When assisting in an incident in Lincoln on Saturday evening, reporters were informed that there was approximately a six-hour wait for an ambulance to arrive.
Sue Cousland, Divisional Director for Lincolnshire at East Midlands Ambulance Service said: “The NHS and ambulance service continues to operate under tremendous pressure.
“We know that we’re not able to get to all patients as quickly as we would like to, and we are very sorry that we were not able to do so on this occasion.
“We are doing all we can to address the situation. This includes recruiting additional staff. We welcomed 422 new frontline staff between April 2023 to March 2024. Of these, around 110 are working in Lincolnshire, with a similar recruitment plan already in place for this year.
“Following our recruitment drive and wider work, we are starting to see some improvement with our average response time for category two patients decreasing from one hour six minutes in 2022-23, 43 minutes in 2023-24, and a further reduction to 34 minutes from 1 April to 31 May 2024.
“Between April 2023 and March 2024, we lost 134,000 hours waiting to handover patients across the East Midlands. Our priority is of the safe, quality care of our patients. In Lincolnshire, we are working very hard with our system partners to reduce the negative impact of delays on patients and our staff.
“We need the public to continue to support us by only calling 999 in a life-threatening emergency and would encourage the use of NHS 111 and other services where appropriate, to allow us to prioritise.”
