Almost half of ambulance delays happening at just 15 NHS trusts

Health minister warns of 'very striking' differences between hospital trusts and says Government won't 'sugarcoat' scale of challenges

Almost half of ambulance delays are occuring at just 15 hospital trusts across the country, a health minister has said, as he vowed to tackle “underperformance” at failing organisations.

Robert Jenrick said the differences between NHS trusts were “very striking” and said the Government would do far more to force improvements at the worst hospitals.

Speaking at a fringe event at the Conservative Party conference, Mr Jenrick said neither he or Therese Coffey, the new Health Secretary, intended to “sugarcoat” the scale of the challenges now facing the NHS.

“The very striking dynamic is the variability that we see within the NHS,” he said.

“We shouldn't be tolerant of those parts of the NHS which are underperforming. And the statistics speak for themselves: 45 per cent of the delays that we see in handing over ambulances at emergency departments across the country are in 15 NHS hospital trusts.”

The health minister, a former Treasury and housing minister, told the Policy Exchange event that the Government was determined to get a grip on poor performance - with urgent and emergency care the most immediate focus.

“I think we will be very clear that we've got to work with those trusts that are not delivering an acceptable level of care for their patients and really try to raise those standards very quickly. And urgent and emergency care I think is probably the most pressing ones of those - because we have such a short period ahead of us to get the NHS into the right place ahead of the winter,” he said.

Officials said the 15 hospital trusts had been identified as having the longest handover delays over last winter.

The statistics show that University Hospitals Birmingham foundation trust had 6,872 waits of more than an hour. These made up a twentieth of all such delays across the country.

Next was University Hospitals Bristol and Weston NHS Foundation Trust, with 5,356, followed by Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust with 4,812.

Hospitals in Leicester, North Midlands, North West Anglia, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Worcestershire, Shrewsbury and Telford, Essex, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Norwich, North Lincolnshire and Cornwall also feature.

In total there were more than 134,000 delays of more than an hour last winter, leaving ambulances stuck queuing outside hospitals, unable to unload patients or respond to new calls.

In August Steve Barclay, the then health secretary, summoned the heads of six NHS trusts with the largest number of hours lost to handover delays.

Three were from the South West region, which has repeatedly had long queues outside hospitals in Cornwall and Plymouth, while hospitals in Birmingham, Worcestershire and Leicester were among those told to make urgent improvements.

It followed warnings that delays are harming around 40,000 patients per month, according to the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives. Handover delays caused ambulance crews to lose almost 333,000 hours in the 12 months to July 2022 - 18 times more than the 17,600 hours lost during the same period in 2019 to 2020.

Health chiefs say many of the problems are fuelled by a crisis in social care, which has left hospitals struggling to discharge patients, for want of care at home, or help to get patients out of hospital.

Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, suggested that a focus on “bad apples” would not tackle the underlying problems affecting all trusts.

He said: “If you look at the performance of the very best trusts now, that sort of performance would have made them among the worst a few years ago. I don’t think it’s entirely rational or logical to focus on the worst 15.”

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