North East Ambulance Service

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2016 Westminster Hall

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bailey. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Sunderland West (Mrs Hodgson) on securing this very important debate and on the eloquent way she made the case for her constituents, as have other right hon. and hon. Members for their constituents. People deserve a better service from the North East Ambulance Service.

I join other Members in praising the dedication and commitment shown by the thousands of paramedics who work in the NHS today. They are the best the NHS has to offer and they work under incredibly difficult circumstances delivering life-saving treatment. I add my thanks for the service they provide to us and to all our constituents every day of the week. Although ambulance services continue to deliver a good service for most, as we have heard today, they do not do so for everyone and the service is patchy across the country.

Members have spoken in detail this afternoon about the difficulties facing the North East Ambulance Service and the poor care that many patients have received from it. Over the past few years, the North East Ambulance Service has seen a dramatic deterioration in its performance against national response time standards. Between June 2012 and March 2013, the trust responded to 77% of the most serious emergency calls within eight minutes but, three years later, only 70% of ambulances were arriving within eight minutes. That is compared with the national target of 75%. The decline in standards is even worse for other emergency calls: that figure has fallen from 77% to 62%.

Behind each of these statistics are seriously ill patients and tragic stories of failed care. I hope that my hon. Friend will allow me to say that, when researching this matter, I was deeply shocked to read about an elderly man in her constituency who was told in December that he faced a five-hour wait for an ambulance after collapsing from a suspected stroke—a five-hour wait for an ambulance on the street in the middle of December. That is not what we should expect for our loved ones from our NHS.

When the Minister responds, I hope she will set out what actions the Department of Health is taking to prevent such incidents from ever happening again. The sad truth is that that decline in performance is not restricted to the north-east. The House of Commons Library has forecast that this year only three trusts in the whole of England will meet the national performance target for responding to emergency calls. The service in England has met the target only twice during the past 12 months, and more than 45,000 seriously ill patients have had to wait longer than eight minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

That is a worrying decline in performance. Too many people are being failed by the system and services are starting to fray at the edges. What does the Minister intend to do to improve the quality of care provided by ambulance trusts in England? What conversations has she or her colleagues in the Department had with NHS England about the performance of this ambulance service? What assessment is the Department making of the impact the decline in standards is having on the rest of the NHS in this region?

As we have heard, the truth is that that decline in performance is a symptom of a system that is at breaking point. All aspects of emergency care, from ambulance services to A&E departments, are struggling. In February, A&E departments in England reported their worse performance on record, with just 88% of patients being treated within four hours, compared with a target of 95%. During that period, every hospital in the north-east missed its A&E target and one in 10 patients had to wait more than four hours in A&E before receiving treatment.

Dr Cliff Mann, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, told a national newspaper the month before last:

“The pressures have become unrelenting. In recent days I’ve been contacted by a number of senior doctors, medical directors, high-level people, who are saying the situation now is like nothing they’ve seen before…My own hospital had the busiest day I had ever experienced two weeks ago—these are situations where every time you turn round, there are another four ambulances queueing.”

Those are worrying reports. I ask the Minister to address some of the concerns raised by Dr Mann and to say whether she believes that they are isolated incidents or whether those pressures have become the norm in our NHS.

The North East Ambulance Service’s board has acknowledged that the decline in A&E services has had an impact on its performance. The trust’s most recent board paper said that there were 59% more handover delays of more than one hour in the first quarter of 2015-16 compared with the previous year and 60% more delays of more than two hours. The reality is that too often ambulance crews with vulnerable patients have to wait outside A&E departments because hospitals just do not have the space to admit them. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will offer an explanation for that decline in A&E performance and explain how she will help trusts to turn the situation around, because A&E is struggling and in need of help.

Staff shortages are also a key factor contributing to the challenges facing the North East Ambulance Service. The region currently reports 15% vacancy rates for paramedics, which puts added pressure on existing staff. Local unions have warned that nine in 10 north-east ambulance staff are suffering from work-related stress due to excessive hours and staff shortages. Across England, the recent NHS staff survey found that almost half of ambulance staff felt unwell as a result of work-related stress and one quarter say that their employer does not take positive action on health and wellbeing.

It is clear that not enough is being done to support ambulance staff, and that is bad for patient care. Unhealthy staff mean unhealthy patients, and we cannot allow that situation to continue in the north-east or elsewhere in England. I therefore ask the Minister what steps her Department is taking to address staff shortages in the ambulance services in the north-east and across the country. Does she agree that more needs to be done to support the health and wellbeing of front-line paramedics?

It is clear from the speeches that we have heard today that this trust is struggling against a number of key performance indicators that are widely available. I hope that, when the Minister responds, she will agree that patients in the north-east deserve better than that. I hope that she will also agree that we cannot allow that dramatic decline in performance to continue and that something has to be done to stem the tide.