More than half of ambulance workers have seen a patient die because of a delay in reaching them after a 999 call or overcrowding in A&E, a new survey has found.
The findings, from a survey of frontline paramedics and other ambulance staff, are another stark illustration of the patient safety risks created by the crisis in NHS urgent and emergency care.
“These findings are utterly terrifying,” said Rachel Harrison, the national secretary of the GMB union, which sought the views of more than 1,200 members working in NHS ambulance services in England and Wales.
It asked them if they had ever witnessed a death that had occurred because of a delay involving an ambulance or other part of the care system. Just over half (53%) said they had done so and another 30% were aware of it happening with a colleague.
Three-quarters (76%) of those surveyed said that delays had an impact on patient care every day. And over half (52%) said they had spent an entire shift waiting outside an A&E to hand a patient over to hospital staff.
The findings are disclosed in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary being shown this Thursday about how long delays in ambulance crews handing over patients to A&E staff, and thus being unable to respond quickly to 999 calls, are affecting both patients and staff.
The programme is based on footage secretly shot over three months by Daniel Waterhouse, am emergency medical technician with the East of England ambulance service, who has since resigned.
“The delay and dilation of care that we see is just unconscionable,” Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told the programme.
The RCEM, which represents A&E doctors, last week issued new analysis which found that a patient dies every 23 minutes as a direct result of spending at least 12 hours in A&E, usually because they are waiting for a bed in the main hospital.
“We’ve seen patients this winter who have been harmed because of ambulance delays,” Dr Sanjeev Nayak, a leading stroke doctor, told Dispatches. “If they’re late, we cannot treat them, there’s very little we as doctors can do. A couple of hours’ delay means the patient can die or suffer disability.”
Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, a consultant cardiologist and the associate medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said when a patient has had a heart attack it is vital that an ambulance gets to them as soon as possible because “minutes can be the difference between life and death”.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “No one should have to wait longer than necessary to access urgent and emergency care, and waiting times have substantially reduced from the peak of winter pressures in December.
“Our urgent and emergency care recovery plan, which was welcomed by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, will allow people to be seen quicker by scaling up community teams, expanding virtual wards, and getting 800 new ambulances on the road.
“This is on top of £750m we’ve provided this winter to speed up hospital discharge and free up beds.”
