Last week, I helped organise an NHS Shropshire Ambulance Summit to review with NHS leaders and others what actions are being taken to tackle widespread delays in ambulance responses to emergencies.
We all recognise the pressure across the NHS, rising steadily since the country emerged from the pandemic a year ago. This is causing unprecedented delays in ambulances attending emergencies.
We reviewed actions to get the patient-flow back on a trajectory towards meeting national clinical targets for ambulance attendance times, handover times on arrival at hospital, time spent in emergency departments before admission and patient discharge for those medically fit at the other end of their hospital treatment.
Paramedics are doing a great job when they can attend emergencies. But they face long delays in ambulances when they get to hospital to hand over their patents – for the first two weeks of July, ambulances were waiting, on average, two and a half hours at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and three hours at Princess Royal Hospital.
This is totally unsatisfactory, and everyone involved is aware that our hospitals need to improve the flow of patients to allow the ambulance service to do its job.
West Midlands Ambulance Service has recruited fifty extra staff members. But hospitals are also seeing a 10% increase in patients arriving other than by ambulance. The proportion of patients requiring major assistance is also rising, increasing pressure on A&E staff.
Shropshire’s NHS is working to improve its capacity to cope with additional patients through its hospitals, adding a new ward last year, and working with social care partners to speed up discharges. In the short term, building social care capacity is crucial.
On Friday’s BBC Newsnight and with the new Health & Social Care Secretary in the Commons on Monday, I argued that attracting people into the care sector would be a quick win, particularly for rural domiciliary carers who cannot recover their higher travel costs. Speeding discharges of medically fit patients will increase capacity within hospitals and allow faster handovers at Emergency Departments.
Closer integration between the NHS and social care came into effect in Shropshire this month, through the Shropshire Telford & Wrekin Integrated Care System.
In the medium term, the Hospital Transformation Plan is essential, and all MPs have agreed to endorse its strategic outline case due to be reviewed by the Department for Health and NHS England later this month.
I am determined do everything I can to restore effective emergency cover across Shropshire.