How is the Welsh Government reducing the time spent by ambulances waiting outside hospitals with patients?
I remain concerned about the level of ambulance patient handover delays across Wales and the impact these have on ambulance service resources. We have been clear with health boards about our expectation for improvement in the timeliness of ambulance patient handovers to ensure crews are released to respond to other 999 calls in the community.
Reducing these delays is a key priority for all health boards in Wales as set out in our NHS Wales Planning Framework, and features as part of LHB Chairs’ objectives.
On 29 October 2024, we published new Ambulance patient handover guidance. It is intended to set a statement of intent for health boards to deliver when managing the ambulance patient handover process, and set out key actions for consistent delivery to support optimal outcomes and experience.
The NHS Executive will undertake audits of organisations’ compliance with the guidance over the remainder of 2024/2025.
More broadly, a whole system effort is required to secure the necessary improvement. All health boards have six goals for urgent and emergency care programme plans in place, each supported by £2.7m in additional Welsh Government funding. And successful delivery of these plans should support improvements across a range of measures, including the reduction of ambulance patient handover delays contributing to improved ambulance responsiveness.
This six goals funding is part of a wider package of more than £180m in additional Welsh Government funding this year to support health boards and regional partnership boards to safely manage more people in the community; to avoid ambulance transport and admission to hospital; and deliver integrated solutions with social care services to improve patient flow through hospitals.
All health and social care partners have plans for what is likely to be a challenging winter period to enable delivery of resilient services as far as is possible. The identification of the strategic issues and learning from other UK systems has led to the introduction of the 50-day integrated care winter challenge. Through this, ten best practice initiatives have been identified that demonstrably improve patient flow and should be implemented in every health board region/system to safely reduce admissions and improve discharge. For example, there will be renewed focus on:
- Delivering our new community-based falls services framework to help more people stay safely at home following a non-serious fall;
- 7 day working to enable discharge of patients during the weekend; and
- A Trusted Assessor model for all care settings
I expect increased focus on these initiatives to support improved patient flow across the system to help release hospital capacity and enable more timely handover of patients from ambulances to the care of hospital staff.
We continue to monitor progress closely.