New Cross Hospital fines double as 221 left waiting in ambulances

The latest fines for January are more than double the £38,000 the hospital was ordered to pay in December, making it £123,000 in fines in just two months.

In total, 221 patients were left waiting outside A&E in ambulances in January, costing the trust £44,200. The trust is fined £200 for every patient that is kept waiting between 30 and 60 minutes.

And 41 patients were left stuck outside the department for over an hour, costing the trust £1,000 every time. There were no patients who breached the 12-hour target to be seen during January.

New Cross chief executive David Loughton blasted government bosses for the fines, saying it de-motivates staff.

Mr Loughton said: "Patient safety and care is all that motivates our ambulance staff. We do really well to get our ambulances back on the road quickly. Sometimes you could have only six ambulances attend in an hour, another time you could have 25.

"If you've only got 19 bays, you've got a problem.

"Handing out these fines is not fair because it de-motivates our staff and makes them feel that the job they're doing isn't good enough, even though they are doing a fantastic job. The system needs to be demolished, and quickly."

The latest figures, revealed at as part of the Integrated Quality and Performance Report at a Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust Board meeting at New Cross Hospital this week, showed that the trust was fined a total of £85,200.

There were 4,142 total patients conveyed via ambulance, and average of 134 a day. In January last year, the trust was fined £20,000, and the year before it was fined £49,600.

National guidelines state patients should be handed over from the care of paramedics to hospital staff in under 15 minutes.

The figures for December showed a huge increase in the number of patients stuck in ambulances for more than 30 minutes compared to the previous month. In November, 30 handovers at New Cross exceeded 30 minutes – the lowest amount since August 2015 – and there were four over an hour.

Over the month there were 353 fewer ambulances which arrived at A&E than in December, totalling at 3,729. In December 2015 128 patients had to wait more than 30 minutes while four waited more than an hour. The trust was fined £29,600 by Wolverhampton CCG.