Ambulance Waiting Times: Royal Cornwall Hospital — House of Commons, 2022-06-29
Topic: Health
Cherilyn Mackrory (Conservative, Centre-right): This issue of ambulance waiting times at the Royal Cornwall Hospital is vital to my constituents and the whole of Cornwall. I want to start by thanking all health and social care colleagues for their hard work. They work with such professionalism, dedication and selflessness, despite being short-staffed and under immense pressure. It is telling that the constituents who write to me on these issues include praise for the staff who have helped them with such compassion and care in their time of need. Over the past 12 months, I, alongside my five Cornish MP colleagues, have had many meetings with NHS leaders and other Cornish healthcare stakeholders to discuss these challenges. We have also written to Ministers to highlight individual cases and the wider situation on numerous occasions, and I appreciate this opportunity to again highlight the situation in Cornwall to Ministers Ambulance waiting times at the Royal Cornwall Hospital are an increasing concern, with the hospital recently recording the worst ambulance wait times in the country, topping the list for the proportion of arrivals that were delayed by more than an hour, at 41%; this represents 10% of the wait times in the whole of England. There is widespread consensus that ambulance response times are slow in Cornwall due to handover delays. The Royal Cornwall Hospital has the highest percentage of handovers over 60 minutes, at 25%. That is particularly concerning, given that the NHS standard contract states that all handovers of patients between ambulances and accident and emergency should take place within 15 minutes, with none taking more than 30 minutes. These handover delays of over 15 minutes have contributed to an average of 255 ambulance hours lost every day in May. I receive several emails each week from constituents who have experienced these delays first hand. One such constituent wrote recently that they were transferred by ambulance to the RCH in the early afternoon. On arrival, there were 15 other ambulances already waiting for their patients to be admitted. During the afternoon, evening and night, they were transferred to five other ambulances and crews. The various categories of ambulances offered stretcher beds of varying levels of discomfort, and there was a shortage of blankets, no access to food and no toilet facilities. They were eventually admitted to the emergency department at around 5 the following morning Delayed handovers result in poorer ambulance response times, as ambulances queue outside A&E unable to attend patients waiting in the community. That leaves patients at increased risk of delays in diagnosis and treatment, and compromises the ability to respond to serious incidents. These delays also increase pressure on clinical staff and on ambulance service call handlers, who look after distressed patients and their families, who call again and again, desperate to hear their wait time. That can lead to thousands of additional calls, placing even more pressure on the service. Constituents have told me that they have waited 13 hours for an ambulance and that they have called many times in the interim to chase an update on the expected arrival time. Let me be clear: these delays are not to do with ambulance service call handlers; they are a whole-system issue and are impacted by acute challenges elsewhere in the system, particularly with hospital capacity and patient flow. The issues include delayed discharges to social care and other services, as well as bed occupancy. As such, a whole-system approach is needed to tackle this issue.