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We are all taught from a very young age that if it’s a genuine emergency, where someone is seriously injured or ill, and their life is at risk, we should call 999 and the ambulance service will be there to help. However, West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) is now at terrible risk of collapse.
WMAS Director, Mark Docherty, has warned that by 17 August 2022, the service will fail. They are currently facing a ‘catastrophic situation’ of long hospital handovers and delayed response times which is undoubtedly putting lives at risk. Mr Docherty has warned that patients are dying needlessly everyday due to the strain on the service.
In an interview with the Health Service Journal, Mr Docherty raised his concerns over the potential ‘Titanic moment’ collapse of WMAS and called for NHS England and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to step in and control the concerning situation.
A major concern is the that some patients have waited in the back of an ambulance for 24 hours before being admitted to hospital, and that serious incidents have quadrupled in the past year - largely as a result of these severe handover delays. This is a national problem and NHS data has shown that in March 2022, ambulance trusts nationwide had slow response times to even the most urgent of incidents.
Mr Docherty says the NHS England officials have downplayed the problem of delayed discharge, and he has questioned why the CQC have issued improvement notices about hospital corridor care, but not the ambulance handover delays when patients are dying every day due to avoidable delays. The CQC have commented that the impact of the escalating pressure on the NHS is severe and the long delays for patients are unacceptable.
Over 100 serious incidents have been recorded at the West Midlands Ambulance Service relating to patient deaths, resulting from the service being unable to respond as the ambulances were held outside hospitals. There have been a number of reports of Shropshire patients waiting extreme periods of time for hospital beds, and repeated anger over death’s occurring as a result of the ambulance delays.
Mr Doherty predicts that WMAS will collapse by 17 August 2022, stating this is when a third of the resources will be lost to delays - meaning that ambulances simply will not be able to respond to emergency calls. The risk level was rated at its highest level ever in October 2021, and the situation has failed to improve since. In April 2022, there were 17,795 hours lost due to handover delays of over 30 minutes. By June, this had risen to over 2,100 hours which is the highest number ever experienced by WMAS, with the worst delay involving a crew waiting more than 25 hours at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.
NHS England has said £150 million has been allocated to tackling this issue, but is this just a tiny sticking plaster on a massive gaping wound? Is it too late for the service to be saved? Will other ambulance services nationwide face the same fate?
With Mr Docherty stating that this is the biggest problem facing the NHS right now, the question remains: how much worse can it get and what happens if this collapse does in fact happen?
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