Patient Deaths: Ambulance Waiting Times

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Markham (Con)]

Local ICBs—integrated care boards—are integral to this, understanding the need for ambulances in each of their areas. As noble Lords have heard me say before, often, having a fall does not require an ambulance response at all, but it is much better to have a full service. Now, it is the responsibility of every ICB to set up a full service so it can respond more appropriately. Additionally, we are tasking each ICB with getting on top of ambulance wait times.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s February report says:

“The crisis in emergency care is relentless and staff are burned out and exhausted. The significant shortfall of beds and staff is driving this crisis.”


In February there were 1.2 million A&E attendances. More than 126,000 patients waited more than four hours from the decision to admit them—these are trolley waits —and nearly 35,000 of those were delayed by more than 12 hours. What are the Government doing in their workforce plan to look at projected workload and figures and ensure that the plan has minimum staffing levels and staff numbers overall?

[Lord Markham (Con)]

The noble Baroness is correct that capacity is key to this, as are the workforce and the workforce plan. I am pleased to say that a more advanced version of that will be published shortly, hopefully showing that we are getting on top of it. At the same time, we have put 7,000 extra beds into the system, which is starting to have an impact. Category 2 wait times are down by an hour compared with last month, but clearly there is more that we need to do.