The number of patients waiting an hour or more to be transferred from an ambulance into an NHS A&E ward has doubled in England over the past two years.



There were 111,524 people who waited at least 60 minutes in an ambulance in 2016-17, up from 51,115 in 2014-15, prompting fears about patient safety. The increase was even more pronounced in some parts of the country, with figures from South East Coast ambulance service (Secamb) showing the number more than quadrupled over the same period, while in London it almost trebled.

Earlier this year, NHS Improvement (NHSI) said: “Tolerating ambulance handover delays is tolerating significant risk of harm to patients.”

Labour, which obtained the figures through freedom of information requests, said they were a sign the NHS has been “pushed to the brink”.

The shadow health secretary, Jon Ashworth, said: “These figures show an ambulance service pushed to the brink by years of Tory underinvestment. It’s clear that NHS services last year were operating at the absolute limit of what they could cope with.

“There is no excuse for the government to allow another crisis on this scale to develop this year. They’ve been well warned and they should take action to sort it out.”



The sight of ambulances queuing outside hospitals has become increasingly familiar in recent years and the figures explain why. South Western ambulance service was the only one of the 10 English ambulance trusts to record a decline (by almost a third) in waits of an hour or more between 2014-15 and 2016-17.

There was also an increase – by three-quarters, to 509,062 – in patients waiting 30 minutes or longer for admission to an emergency ward. Every trust recorded a rise from 2014-15, except West Midlands ambulance service, which did not provide the relevant statistics on half-hour waits.

As with patients waiting an hour or more, Secamb showed the biggest increase. The next biggest rises were recorded by Yorkshire ambulance service and then North West ambulance service. In these three trusts the number of waits of 30 minutes or more last year was more than double the corresponding figure in 2014-15.

NHSI has said that when ambulances are forced to queue, it increases the risk to patients because of delays in diagnosis in treatment, and means the vehicles are not available to respond to other emergencies. No targets for NHS ambulance response times have been met since May 2015.

In advice to hospitals and ambulance services, published in March, NHSI wrote: “It is crucial that patients are assessed on arrival in the ED [emergency department] and ambulance crews are freed up to attend the next emergency call.”

Ashworth said: “Theresa May has a choice in the budget: give the NHS the money it needs to deliver a decent standard of care, or leave NHS patients stranded in pain in the back of ambulances because the hospitals are just too full to cope.”



A Department of Health (DH) spokeswoman said: “In the face of huge increases in demand, our paramedics and call-handlers are working exceptionally hard and answering 4,500 more 999 calls every day compared to five years ago.

“Nevertheless, we expect patient handovers from ambulance to A&E to happen within 30 minutes and where delays occur hospital and ambulance trusts have a responsibility to make improvements.”

The figures on ambulance handover delays were published on the same day as the King’s Fund’s latest quarterly monitoring report also illustrated the pressures facing the NHS.

Half (51%) of the 85 (out of a total of 233) NHS trust directors who responded to the thinktank said patient care in their area had got worse over the last year. Less than half of trusts (45%) expect to meet their financial targets this year, its survey found.

Siva Anandaciva, chief analyst at the King’s Fund, described the results as “sobering” and said they showed “NHS funding pressures are now having a real impact on the people using its services”. Like Ashworth he urged the government to make additional funding available in the budget.

An NHS England spokesman said: “As the Care Quality Commission recently reported, the NHS’s high standards of care have been maintained and in many cases improved.”

The DH spokeswoman said the NHS was “better prepared for winter than ever before, supported by an additional £100m funding for A&Es and £2bn for social care”.