Patients forced to wait for ambulance

Ambulance waiting times for emergency patients in the North-West reached almost 40 minutes last year.

One incident in 2007-2008 saw a category-A patient, the most urgent emergency, wait up to 38 minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

Government targets say ambulance trusts should reach category A patients within eight minutes in 75 per cent of cases.

However, all but one of the other ambulance trusts in the country fared worse than the North-West Ambulance Service (NWAS), with one patient in Wales forced to wait three hours and 47 minutes for an emergency ambulance.

John Burnside, chief executive of NWAS, said the service was always busy over winter but was experiencing extremely high levels of 999 calls this year.

He said: “We have increased our resource levels to prepare for the winter period and ambulance staff are working extremely hard to make sure that patients receive a speedy and safe response.”

Critics have blamed the government’s four-hour maximum treatment time, which starts from when a patient enters accident and emergency units, for the delays.

They claim ambulances queue outside hospitals and drop off patients only when they are certain to be seen within the allotted time.

Mr Burnside said: “There are occasions when the handover of patients from ambulance to hospital is delayed due to high demand, which can impact on our ability to free up ambulances to respond to other calls.”