Ambulance Pressures

Philip Dunne Excerpts

Monday 18th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

The hon. Gentleman is right that the west midlands in particular has been under significant pressure, and 111 ambulance service response times are significantly challenged, which is driven by wider system pressure and delayed handing over of patients. The measures taken through the national support that is going in include handover delay improvements, on which works is taking place across all integrated care boards. NHS England has allocated an additional £150 million to support the system, and an extra £20 million of capital is going into fleet. Given that I am new in post, I am happy to meet the hon. Gentleman to discuss any specific issues about the West Midlands ambulance service’s performance.

[Philip Dunne (Ludlow) (Con)]

May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his new role and say how important, given this particular crisis, his previous experience as Minister of State for Health is? He took over that role from me, and he had ministerial responsibility for ambulances.

On Friday, I attended an ambulance summit with other Shropshire and Telford MPs, West Midlands ambulance service and NHS leaders in Shropshire, where we were told that one of the critical issues in ambulance response is the handover wait times at hospitals. Royal Shrewsbury Hospital was averaging two and a half hours for handover in the first two weeks of July, and the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford was at three hours.

The problem is not so much conveyance by ambulance because it is hard to reach patients, but ambulatory walk-ins at our hospitals increasing the volumes of patients being seen in A&E. The problem with that increase in patient volume is patient flow and discharge at the far end. May I suggest that the quick win would be to increase resources for social care, particularly for domiciliary care workers who at present, particularly in rural areas, have to pay for their own transport to get from one patient to another? If we could improve those conditions, it would boost the ability to discharge patients.

[Steve Barclay]

My right hon. Friend, partly through the direct experience he brings to these issues, highlights the integrated nature of the challenge we face and in particular the importance of getting the right domiciliary care and care home support in place. Part of that challenge in the coming weeks, ahead of any autumn and winter pressure, will be to understand what the capacity is and what the constraints on it are, so that through the integrated care boards we can better focus on unlocking that capacity to relieve the pressure on ambulance handovers, as he sets out.