Patient waited 62 hours for
ambulance,
Media caption Sylvia
Marsh was left waiting for an ambulance after falling and breaking her hip.
The longest delays in the
UK were recorded by Welsh Ambulance Service, which kept four patients waiting
for more than 50 hours.
A spokesman said the
figures were "not typical" and "represent the extreme end of the
waiting time spectrum".
The Patients Association
said they were "extremely concerning".
Between June 2017 and June
2018, ambulances from four services took 24 hours to reach patients, including
some with breathing and mental health problems.
The trusts said the
longest waits were for "less serious calls", and they had to
prioritize responding to people in life-threatening or urgent conditions.
Most ambulance services
also reported achieving the national target of responding to the most serious
type of call in an average of eight minutes or less.
Longest waits for an
ambulance in the UK from June 2017 to June 2018 included 62 hours for the Welsh
Ambulance Service, 25 hours for East of England, 25 hours for South East Coast,
24 hours for South Central, 24 hours for Yorkshire, 24 hours for North East, 18
hours for East Midlands, 14 hours for Isle of Wight, 14 hours for London, 14
hours for Scottish Ambulance Service, 10 hours for West Midlands, 5 hours for
South West and 3 hours for North West.
Lucy Watson, from the Patients Association, said:
"Everybody should be getting the services that they need.
"We know that demand
has gone up on all health services as our population is getting older, and we
need to see the level of investment increasing so our ambulances can respond in a timely
way." 'Completely
unacceptable'
Caroline Hardaker's mother Sylvia, 79, lay on paving stones in
her back garden for three-and-a-half hours after falling and breaking her hip
in High Wycombe.
She
said: "I think I rang six times in the end, and each time they said they
would have a clinician call back and then they didn't. "It
was so frustrating, just thinking 'how long are they going to take'? And my mum
was going into shock, her arms were shaking. Her arm had gone numb. "She
was obviously cold because
she was lying on a
pavement.
"The ambulance and
hospital staff have been fantastic - its not their fault, the whole system is
breaking down. "When I was a child you were told it would be a maximum of
eight minutes for an ambulance, but three-and-a-half hours is completely
unacceptable."
Paul Jefferies, from South
Central Ambulance Service, which covers High Wycombe, said if patients
experienced delays it was because "higher categories of calls took
priority".
Stephen Clinton, assistant director of operations for Welsh
Ambulance Service, said: "We fully accept that a number of patients waited
far longer than anyone would like. "That said, these figures represent the
extreme end of the waiting time spectrum and are
neither typical nor do they explain the circumstances of these individual
cases."
He said in some of the
cases the patients were already in the care of medical teams, and others were
affected by extreme weather conditions.
The service did not provide details of the four patients who waited more than 50
hours. But the longest three calls were in the second-most serious
"amber" category, classified as "patients who may need treatment
at scene or taking quickly to health facility". The remaining call was
rated "green", a classification used for "less urgent
calls".
The new figures, obtained by the BBC after a Freedom of
Information request, also show that between 2015 and 2017, the total number of
calls received increased by 15%.
In 2015, UK ambulance
services received 8,892,346 calls, which rose to 9,891,559 in 2016 and
10,242,507 in 2017.
An Association of
Ambulance Chief Executives spokesman said resources had been stretched by
"an exceptionally long and busy winter".
An NHS Improvement
spokesman said it had recently introduced an ambulance response program to help
services cope with the increasing demand. He added: "An additional £36
million of funding recently announced will boost paramedic crews and improve
the quality of NHS ambulance fleets."
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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