NHS Improvement has allocated £150 million of additional funding to ambulance services to help address pressures, alongside reducing ambulance handover delays. Even though the pandemic placed significant pressure on response times, there have been improvements in all response time categories in both April and May, with average response times to category 2 emergency calls—such as strokes and heart attacks—reduced by about 11 minutes and 24 seconds in May alone. Work continues with the service to restore performance.
My Lords, it is difficult to thank the Minister for the Answer because it is a totally unsatisfactory one. I have been raising this question for about the last six months. The reality is that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, told me when her son had a stroke and 999 was called, it took nearly six hours. He suffered serious consequences as a result of that. People are dying as we sit in this Chamber, literally thousands of them. Why? Because paramedics are waiting with trolleys in hospitals for a bed. There is a simple solution to this problem, which I have been suggesting to the Minister. I have also given him a place—Wolverhampton—where they have solved this problem. Yet, still we do not seem to treat this as a matter of urgency. It is a national disgrace and I want an assurance from the Minister that real action is to be taken—and that does not mean an 11-minute improvement.
I begin by thanking the noble Lord for his engagement with me and the department on this issue. When the noble Lord has sent me details or suggestions, I have passed them to the relevant officials within the department. I hope I can assure that noble Lord that I have done that. As the noble Lord will know, within departments we have particular portfolios and I have to hand it on to the person responsible. In terms of the recovery plan, the NHS has published a 10-point action plan for urgent and emergency care. I will not go through the whole action plan, but it includes dealing with paramedics, recruitment and retention, and more space in A&E departments. At the same time, can requests be handled by telephone by clinicians and patients diverted to a more appropriate resource? All these have been looked at. I understand that the noble Lord thinks it is unsatisfactory, but we have been hit by the pandemic, we are trying to recover and there is a plan.
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Young, is right that handover times have a particular impact on ambulance services. I was pleased to hear the Minister mention recruitment and retention in A&E departments. This is a long-standing problem in emergency services. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine states that emergency medicine has a high attrition rate. I know that a number of steps have been set out. Can the Minister state what success they are having and, if they are not succeeding yet, what further steps the Government plan to set out? We need a change in direction as soon as possible.
I thank my noble friend for the question and also for the point that this happens at number of different points in the system. Clearly, there are recruitment campaigns for doctors and nurses. In addition, the number of ambulance and support staff has increased by almost 40% since 2010. Call handler numbers have also increased since the start of May 2022; we have 400 more. In addition, there are pledges to increase the training of paramedic graduates nationally by 3,000 per annum. All these will take time to get into the system, which is still recovering from the pandemic.
My Lords, when Sandra Francis of Oswestry had a cardiac arrest a few months ago, her son had to do 35 minutes of CPR waiting for an ambulance delayed in handovers at A&E. Sadly, she died. Her son said:
“An ambulance should be a way of getting someone to hospital. It shouldn’t be a waiting room sat at the hospital.”
He is right. Ambulance delays are the very visible part of the A&E crisis and the wider shortage of hospital beds, doctors and other healthcare professionals. Again, I ask the Minister: what are the Government doing to remedy this much wider emergency that is causing preventable deaths right now?
The noble Baroness will be aware that there are a number of things going on with the 10-point plan. Maybe I will go through some of the points now. We are supporting 999 and 111 services, making sure that the appropriate person answers the call; supporting primary care and community health services to manage those services; making more use of urgent treatment centres; and providing more support for children and young people. Sometimes people ring 999 but do not need emergency treatment and they can be redirected to another clinician, who can speak to them and that takes pressure off. We are recruiting more staff and looking at more prevention and looking at different rules which prevent the appropriate workflow through the system.
My Lords, some months ago, as my wife lay dying in my arms, I phoned the 999 service. The man answering the call asked me a litany of questions and asked me to count her number of heartbeats per minute. That waste of time is critical; with a cardiac arrest you have only a few seconds. I had to interrupt the cardiac massage that I was giving my wife until the emergency services arrived, but of course they had not been called yet. When eventually the man backed down, it was obvious that he had not been trained to ask the right questions. Can the Minister assure the House that there is proper training for people who answer these calls at these critical times, when they are dealing with someone who may recognise that their close relative is dying, and that the latter can hear what they are saying on the telephone? It is highly dangerous and that makes it very difficult. The last thing we hear as we die is usually the voice of someone who is with us.
I thank the noble Lord for sharing that very personal story. Clearly, there are too many incidents of this kind. One of the issues that we have to be very careful about as we look to recruit more numbers is to look at the system and at how to divert the less urgent calls. Probably in that case the person was trained to ask particular questions to ascertain how serious or urgent it was but, clearly, that was inappropriate. I will take that case back to the department and see whether I can get some answers.
My Lords, our prime objective must be to eliminate all these unacceptable delays as quickly as possible. Can the Minister confirm what work is being done in the interim to ensure that effective pastoral care is available for those who are currently waiting for long periods in ambulances, particularly for the many for whom last rites and other rituals that take place at the point of death form an important part of their faith?
The right reverend Prelate raises an important issue for those of faith who want to share their last moments of life with someone. I am afraid that I do not have a detailed answer, but I will go back to the department and write to the right reverend Prelate.
My Lords, as other noble Lords have said, ambulance delays are a symptom of pressures elsewhere in the health and care system. At the end of April, 62% of over 20,000 patients in England who were medically fit to be discharged remained in hospital, largely due to a lack of appropriate social care provision. Can the Minister say how and when there will be a fully costed workforce plan to ensure that the relevant staff are in place to urgently tackle this bottleneck?
The noble Baroness will know from the debates that we had during the passage of the Health and Care Bill that there is a 15-year plan; Health Education England has been tasked with that. In addition, significant amounts of things are being done at the local trust level, so it is not just a sort of five-year, top-down Soviet-type plan but is looking at recruitment at a local level. There is also a national discharge task force that works with national and local government and the NHS to identify long-term sustainable changes which could reduce delayed discharges and ensure that patients are in hospital only for as long as they need to be.
My Lords, what role does the Minister think the police might have to play in this? Last Wednesday I was knocked down in Great George Street by a bicycle and rendered unconscious. Although a paramedic arrived from St Thomas’ by bicycle quite quickly, there was no ambulance. I was very grateful to the police for taking me into St Thomas’ and depositing me at the A&E. That was very helpful, and I wonder whether the Minister thinks that might happen more often.