Ambulance handover delays cost the NHS an estimated £225m in 2022 as health system reaches 'a crisis moment'
16 January 2023, 08:11
An LBC analysis has uncovered the scale of the financial pressure placed on the NHS by ambulance handover delays, with over £225m estimated to have been lost in 2022 alone.
Stipulated within the standard NHS contract is a target that the transfer of a patient from an ambulance to an Accident and Emergency Department should take no more than fifteen minutes upon arrival at a hospital, with anything beyond this constituting a handover delay.
However, tying together data from the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives and NHS England, LBC found that over 1.7 million hours were lost to such delays in England and Wales across 2022.
As well as provoking considerable concerns surrounding patient safety and satisfaction - already under the microscope with ambulance response times and A&E waits the worst on record - our analysis puts the cost to the taxpayer into sharp focus.
According to East Midlands Ambulance Service, handover delays translate to a cost of £133 per hour which, applied to LBC’s research, indicates that in excess of £225m was wasted across the NHS as a result of these delays.
We put this to Alan Milburn, a former health secretary under Sir Tony Blair; along with outlining some of the factors underpinning these delays, he could not disguise his alarm in relation to LBC’s findings.
“The reason that you’ve got ambulances backed up outside of Accident and Emergency departments is that the A&Es are full… All the way through, the system is backed up: it’s not configured in the right way, it’s not organised in the right way, and it doesn’t have the capacity to do the right things for patients,” said Milburn.
“We’ve reached a crisis moment and [LBC’s] analysis, unfortunately, is deeply accurate. This is a wake up call and it’s a wake up call for the government to act with real urgency.”
In addition to laying bare the sheer financial cost to the NHS, the data scrutinised by LBC revealed that owing to handover delays, the equivalent of 141,000 twelve-hour ambulance crew shifts were spent tending to patients in the corridors of hospitals and in ambulances parked outside A&E departments.
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Speaking to LBC, Garrett Emerson, who served as CEO of the London Ambulance Service, spelt out the implications of this for patients across the country:
“Instead of being able to go out and do the right number of patient calls and jobs, they [ambulance crews] are spending much more time caring for patients at A&Es, at acute hospitals.
"[This] means only one of two things can happen: either the ambulance service has got to put on more crews, with more vehicles and more overtime to respond to the patients those crews are unable to get to, or else you’re going to see an increase in delays for patients, which of course is what we have seen particularly over the last twelve months.”
Responding to LBC’s findings, a Department of Health spokesperson said: “No one should have to wait longer than necessary for emergency care, which is why we are taking urgent action to support services.
“We recognise the pressures the NHS is facing and the health and social care secretary announced up to £250 million of additional funding to immediately help reduce hospital bed occupancy, alleviate pressures on A&E and unlock much-needed ambulance handovers.
“This is on top of the £500 million 'discharge fund' to speed up the safe discharge of patients who are medically fit to leave hospital, and the NHS creating the equivalent of 7,000 more beds as well as establishing 24/7 data driven system control centres in every local area to manage demand and capacity.”
