Zero tolerance vow on Shropshire ambulance waits
Shropshire's hospitals have pledged to take a zero-tolerance stand over ambulance handovers taking more than an hour, a health chief has said.
Dr Julie Davies, director of performance and delivery of Shropshire Clinical Commissioning Group told Shropshire Council's health and adult social care scrutiny committee that hospitals were doing all they could to reduce handover times.
She said that 'corridor nurses' – specially trained nurses who can deal with patients as they arrive at the hospitals, were now in place and used whenever staffing numbers allowed.
"The NHS is under unprecedented pressure," she said.
"The Royal Shrewsbury Hospital has put on extra staff to try to cut down the handover time.
"Shrewsbury and Telford Hospitals Trust has said it will have a zero-tolerance to handover times of more than an hour by the end of March."
The head of the West Midlands Ambulance Service Mark Docherty told the meeting situations where paramedics are waiting an hour or more to hand over their patients were just not acceptable.
Mr Docherty, executive director of the service, said the times taken to hand patients over at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH) and Princess Royal Hospital (PRH), were by far the longest in the region.
He said: "The National Health Service has massive challenges at the moment – we are absolutely down to the wire and yet the weather has been kind, there has been no flu epidemic and not a huge problem with norovirus," he said.
Figures for hospital handover delays in January show that across the West Midlands RSH and PRH had the greatest delays, with all other hospitals faring better.
During January there were 188 patient handovers that took more than an hour at RSH, while at Telford, the figure was 120 patients. The figures amounted to 13.4 and 6.8 per cent respectively.
The longest wait was at RSH where one crew had to wait with a patient for four hours and 31 minutes.
Mr Docherty told the committee: "Patients should be handed over within 15 minutes.
"If you have a £100,000 ambulance stuck on a car park and two, highly-skilled members of staff out of action for four and a half hours that is a loss of a valuable resource."
