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Today, I’m pleased to be bringing a debate to the House of Commons on ambulance service response times. The scale of this problem is increasingly alarming, as unacceptable ambulance wait times become endemic, leaving people in pain and costing lives.
Shockingly, an estimated 50,000 people died last year after long A&E waits according to ONS data, and nowhere is this more concerning than in the South West, where targets remain unmet and we have the worst performing ambulance service in the country.
One 89-year-old Somerton woman recently faced a ten hour wait stuck in agony on the floor, as no ambulances could come to help her. In fact, the average time it took for South Western Ambulances to respond to a category two call was 51 minutes 45 seconds, which is nearly three times slower than the NHS target.
The statistics are even more terrifying when we consider critical illnesses such as heart attack and stroke, where timing means the difference between life and death. For every minute that a stroke is left untreated, 1.9 million brain cells die, while life saving treatments like clot-busting drugs need to be delivered quickly, often within 4.5 hours.
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With these stark realities facing people in an emergency, it’s important we also consider not only response times, but handover times. The distressing sight of ambulances backed up at hospitals is now commonplace, with ambulances across England collectively having spent 112 years waiting outside of hospitals to hand over patients in 2023/24. This impacts ambulance crews’ turnaround times, and in the South West is an increasing problem, with 30% more handovers taking over 30 minutes than the national average.
For people in Glastonbury and Somerton, fears about delays in treatment due to ambulance response times are compounded by the planned closure of Yeovil District Hospital’s hyper-acute services and the reconfiguration of services to provide cutting-edge care in Dorchester or Taunton. While the treatment and facilities will be better at these centralised locations, unless we address ambulance response times, any benefits to residents are negligible, as they can’t get there in a timely manner in an emergency.
This issue has far greater impact overall in rural regions, as they suffer greater strain on services generally, and because they are less able to divert ambulances to other hospitals during periods of significant pressure due to the distances between emergency departments. Waits for life-threatening calls are 45% longer in rural areas than in urban ones and, additionally, Somerset’s ageing population makes it harder to quickly discharge patients who may require social care provision.
And, of course, we must not forget that bearing the brunt of these systemic failures are our hard working NHS staff. The cost to them of working under these conditions is unimaginable.
The 2023 NHS staff survey showed that 39% of respondents often or always felt that they were burnt out and for ambulance technicians and paramedics that number was 45%. NHS staff are working themselves into the ground, and leaving their professions at higher levels than ever due to stress and health conditions. We urgently need to address the root causes of the extreme stress they’re operating under.
One of the systemic failures which is having a devastating impact on the NHS is the social care crisis. Care England said last year that over 45% of hospital discharge delays are linked to social care, with 1 in 7 hospital beds taken up by people who are medically fit to be discharged. This puts immense pressure on the system, and affects bed flow and capacity. Liberal Democrats have been campaigning to fix social care and welcome the cross-party commission to forge a long-term agreement on social care, but believe this can be achieved in a year rather than the three years set out by the government.
When it comes to the ambulance response times crisis, the Liberal Democrats also have a solid and workable plan. Over the past seven years, the government has announced an average of £376 million of emergency funding each year to tackle the NHS winter crisis. Under the Liberal Democrat proposal a new Winter Taskforce would instead manage a ring fenced fund of £1.5 billion over the next four years, to build resilience in hospital wards, A&E departments, ambulance services and patient discharging. This would allow integrated care boards and NHS Trusts to plan their budgets more efficiently to prevent winter crises, instead of having to receive emergency funding from the government at the last minute.
Unless we can tackle these issues head on, the outlook for the NHS and patient outcomes is bleak. We are now at the point of crisis and we are in dire need of bold, effective action. Continuing to plug a few gaps will simply not suffice. I am urging the government to really consider its approach to make sure we don’t reach breaking point next winter.
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