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Ambulance crew stuck at West Midlands hospital for eight hours

An ambulance crew in the West Midlands was forced to stay at a hospital for more than eight hours because of a shortage of staff or beds.

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And thousands of patients are left waiting longer than 30 minutes at Accident and Emergency departments to be handed over from paramedics to nurses every month. However, the number waiting more than an hour has dropped drastically.

Typically in cases where there may not be enough beds or staff to look after patients straight away they have to stay in the ambulance until the hospital is ready for them.

West Midlands Ambulance Service said the eight-hour 11-minute incident happened when a crew was looking after patients so that other paramedics and ambulance crew unload their own passengers and get back on to the road.

The service was today unable to reveal which hospital it happened at or when.

The stint was revealed in response to a Freedom of Information request from Labour which showed 300,000 patients waited too long to enter A&E departments after ambulances reached hospital doors last year.

West Midlands Ambulance Service said the period quoted related to the amount of time its crew was stationed at the unnamed hospital, not the amount of time any individual patient waited.

The response also showed 3,825 people waited longer than 30 minutes for a handover in April.

However the worst month for waiting at A&E in the past two years was March 2013 with 10,245 patients across the West Midlands having to stay with ambulance crews for at least half an hour.

In March this year 263 were forced to wait for more than an hour, down from 1,637 the same month in 2013.

Jamie Reed, Labour's shadow health minister, said: "Under David Cameron, hospitals are full to bursting and he's forcing ambulances to queue at the doors for hours on end.

"Thousands of vulnerable people, many of them elderly and frightened, are being wrongly held in the backs of ambulances because hospitals don't have the space. And yet Ministers deny that A&E is in crisis."

A West Midlands Ambulance Service Trust spokeswoman said: "It is important to note that no patient in the West Midlands waited eight hours 11 minutes with ambulance crews at hospital.

"On the day in question an ambulance crew was 'cohorting' a number of patients i.e. they were looking after a number of patients at the hospital to allow other crews to leave A&E and respond to further patients.

"The time refers to the amount of time the crew was tied up at the hospital doing so.

"Clearly it is unfortunate that a crew were required to do so as any delay in handover, however short, means that the ambulance is not available to respond to the next case.

"Hospitals in the West Midlands have worked extremely hard to reduce delays over the last 18 months and in the main have been very successful in doing so. On average, delays are now only around an eighth of the levels experienced 18 months ago, which is to be welcomed.

"The trust continues to work closely with each acute hospital in the West Midlands to keep delays to a minimum."

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