In a letter, the head of the NHS health service calls for the queues of ambulances in front of emergency rooms to be ended and ambulances no longer to be used as additional waiting rooms. The risk to patients is enormous, said the medical director of the NHS, Stephen Powis, and the head of the NHS emergency services, Pauline Philip, in the letter, quoted from the PA.
The transfer from the ambulance to the emergency room shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes. The reason for the enormous burden is the corona pandemic, said Martin Flaherty from the Association of Rescue Service Providers.
Died after waiting five hours
Emergency facilities and ambulances are under enormous pressure, also because of distance rules and employees who have to isolate themselves after contact with infected people. Since April, the number of waiting times for ambulances has increased almost tenfold. In September, emergency rooms treated a total of 1.39 million people – more than ever before in a month.
An investigation was opened in the city of Worcester after a patient died while waiting five hours in an ambulance outside the door of the Worcestershire Royal Hospital. In Cambridge, a woman died in a similar case. For the first time in history, the NHS in the West Midlands area of Birmingham raised its risk assessment for delays in emergency handover to the highest level. PA cited from documents that a patient had to be attended to by an ambulance crew for more than 13 hours. There have been several cases in which “severe damage” occurred to patients. (SDA)