East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) personnel have been praised in parliament, but the system is stretched and failing, according to MPs.
The service, which serves South Holland, as well as the rest of Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Rutland, and Northamptonshire, was the subject of a Commons debate on Wednesday.
Possible solutions suggested included the return of a Lincolnshire Ambulance Service. Matt Warman, MP for Boston and Skegness, urged Lincolnshire County Council to explore this, stating that EMAS was created to fix Lincolnshire’s problems but hadn’t done so.
The A&E crisis was also discussed, with South Holland and the Deepings MP John Hayes calling the problem “systemic”. In reply to MP Ruth George’s suggestion that increased demand for primary care, emergency care and ambulance services was not being resourced, Mr Hayes said: “There are issues around administration, management, process and protocols. She has already mentioned ambulances waiting outside hospitals for a very long time because they cannot or will not admit patients. Those are systemic problems, not just resource problems.”
In the parliament debate, one MP reported a queue of 11 ambulances waiting with patients to be admitted to Boston’s Pilgrim Hospital.
Mr Warman responded: “I have raised problems with EMAS every time I have attended health debates in this place, and EMAS has not made a single proactive attempt to reach out to explain even what it is trying to do. I suggest that the waiting times and the service we get from management indicate that the ambulance service is not serving us, as the elected representatives of patients, or patients themselves.
This is a serious situation.”
