Ambulance and Emergency Department Waiting Times

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 6th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) for securing the debate. On 25 May this year, the nursing director of the West Midlands Ambulance Service, Mark Docherty, said that the ambulance trust would face a “Titanic moment” and collapse entirely this summer. He gave the specific date of 17 August. Mark went on to say that patients were “dying every day” from avoidable causes created by ambulance delays. That was 42 days ago. He predicts that we now have another 42 days before the ambulance service in my community collapses.

I have had an Adjournment debate with the Minister on that subject, and a meeting with the former Secretary of State for Health, the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), yet this Government still have not got a grip on the problem. As a proud resident of North Shropshire, I was aware of our ambulance crisis before I was elected in December, and before I started campaigning in November. However, on the campaign trail, and since being elected, it has become evident that the scale of the crisis is absolutely shocking.

Just last week, I was contacted by a constituent whose 85-year-old mother, who suffers from dementia, had fallen and suffered a suspected broken hip. Her son called the ambulance, but she sat in agonising pain in their living room for 18 hours before the ambulance arrived at her home. Everyone in this Chamber will agree that this should not be happening in this country, or in this century. It is one of many stories I have received. Many other people are attended by the ambulance crew in fairly reasonable time, but then wait 12 or 13 hours in the ambulance before being transferred into the hospital.

The focus of this debate should be on solutions to the problem, but it is also crucial to understand how we got here. Ambulance service delays are a symptom of wider issues plaguing the NHS and health services across the country, and the issue of staff shortages is critical to that, as colleagues have alluded to today. So far, the Government have failed to address that. They have thrown our hard-working doctors and nurses pretty much under the bus. We are short of nurses, carers, GPs and decision-making doctors in A&E. In February, the all-party parliamentary group for rural health and care published a report concluding that the 10 million people who live in rural and coastal areas in the UK deserve better healthcare outcomes. Colleagues here representing rural constituencies know from first-hand accounts that it is not just access to healthcare that is compromised but, in the words of the APPG report,

“the very determinants of health itself.”

That is why our ambulance crisis is even worse than in some of Britain’s more urban areas. Worse still, it is hidden by the published data. West Midlands Ambulance Service reports some of the better response times in the country, but a decent outcome in Birmingham and the black country conurbation is masking a deep crisis in the countryside.

How are the hard-working professionals in our NHS to deal with another significant rise in covid admissions? They are struggling to deal with the broken social care service, a hospital bed crisis and people who cannot access a GP and so are turning up at A&E. I know those professionals have the best will in the world, but they simply cannot deal with that. That is why Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust has declared yet another critical incident this week. I have lost count of the number of times that has happened this year—I think it is the fourth or fifth—but a summer incident is unprecedented. The winter is coming at us fast, and now we need to understand what we can do to fix the problem.

We know there is no quick fix, but one thing the Government could do now to understand the problems and come up with effective recommendations is commission the Care Quality Commission to investigate delays in the ambulance service and their underlying causes. In my Adjournment debate before easter, the Minister said it was open for me, or others, to raise that with the CQC. However, they have subsequently written to my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans (Daisy Cooper)—the Liberal Democrat health spokesperson—to confirm that that is not the case. It is clear that while the Health Secretary has the power to commission the CQC, unfortunately I do not. Crucially, Mark Docherty, the nursing director of West Midlands Ambulance Service, has also called for the CQC to investigate the issue. I would like to take this opportunity to urge the newly appointed Health Secretary to commission the CQC to conduct an investigation to identify the measurable actions we need to take to resolve the issues that we face across the country.

The Government could also adopt the recommendations of my hon. Friend the Member for St Albans by commissioning ambulance waiting times by postcode, so that we can direct the resource where it is needed and not just over large regions. They could also act on the recommendations of the APPG’s February report to deal with the health inequalities faced by the one fifth of our population who live living in rural or coastal communities. There are positive steps that can be taken to fix this crisis. I would like the Minister to say exactly what is going to happen now.