Ambulance staff have been instructed to leave severely ill patients in hospital corridors if they’re forced to wait longer than 45 minutes to hand over to emergency medicals teams.
The move could see patients dumped without being admitted in an attempt to reduce delays for life-threatening emergencies.
NHS England has claimed this new ‘drop and go’ approach would free up paramedics so they could respond faster to 999 calls.
Care Minister Stephen Kinnock claimed the policy was being rolled out as it had ‘worked very well’ in London.
Yet Emergency doctors today criticised the move warning it could ‘risk the lives of patients’.
Ambulance staff have been told to leave patients in hospital corridors if they wait longer than 45 minutes (stock image)
London ambulances began testing a policy which saw ambulance crews not wait for the hospital to be ready to take on a new patient, but instead notify a nurse that after45 minutes they would be leaving. In these instances patients were left on trolleys in corridors and in A&E waiting rooms to be seen (stock image)
Speaking on Times Radio this morning Mr Kinnock said: ‘Where there are examples of systems that work, reforms that have been effective.
‘We shouldn’t just close our ears to those, we should look at it and if we can make it work in a different setting, then we should be open to that.’
He also said on LBC that, thanks to the ‘drop and go’ approach, emergency service bosses have been able to get ambulances back to attending urgent issues faster.
It’s meant to take less then 15 minutes for paramedics to hand over patients to hospital staff.
But often overwhelmed hospitals struggle to find time or even beds for new patients.
These delays in admitting patients is one of the reasons why response times for category two calls such as heart attacks and strokes, reached more than an hour and a half last January, when these should be responded to within 18 minutes.
To tackle the problem, London ambulances began testing a policy which saw crews notify a nurse that after 45 minutes they would be leaving, if a hand over hadn’t been carried out.
In these instances patients were left on trolleys in corridors and in A&E waiting rooms.
London isn’t the only area changing how they hand over patients. South Central Ambulance service started it’s ‘fit to sit’ system this year which sees patients with less serious injuries checking in to A&E themselves (stock image)
This scheme has reportedly been a success in the capital with response times now down to half an hour and NHS England has began advising services in other parts of the country to adopt the London scheme.
Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of the London Ambulance Service explained that before introducing the ‘drop and go’ policy they regularly lost up to 600 hours of time every day waiting to hand over patients.
But Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, says it’s ‘not acceptable’ to leave ill and injured patients without a proper handover.
He added that A&E doctors understand ambulances need to return to the front line as quickly as possible but said delays were a symptom of wider NHS pressures.
Many medics outside of London are also against the move.
Dr Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor based in Oxford wrote on X: ‘If this is Labour’s plan for managing the looming winter crisis, then I am horrified.
‘This isn’t fixing the problem, it’s passing the buck, placing intolerable pressures on my colleagues in A&E risking the lives of the patients stranded in the corridors.’
Emergency physician Ian Higginson based in Plymouth also wrote on X adding that the policy ‘won’t fix anything’.
He said: ‘Ambulance drop-and-go policies won’t fix anything in the long run and hide the lack of meaningful action. Hundreds of patients each week are dying in association with overcrowding in emergency departments. How about fixing the actual problem?’
London isn’t the only area changing how they hand over patients. South Central Ambulance Service started it’s ‘fit to sit’ system this year which sees patients with less serious injuries checking in to A&E themselves.
A spokeswoman for NHS England said that the policy has helped London speed up response times and that the NHS was ‘constantly looking at safe and effective ways to reduce delays.’
But it was acknowledged that different areas have different challenges to consider and a ‘safe and complete handover of patients to A&E staff is essential.’
