Last winter, I spoke to a paramedic who had just spent an entire overnight shift – 12 hours, plus an extra two and a half – with one patient. This wasn’t a lengthy extraction of a person from car wreckage, or some kind of marathon CPR session on the scene. It was an elderly patient who had fallen and broken their hip, lying in the back of an ambulance in the hospital car park, from 6.30pm until 9am.
All the while, the paramedic was hearing calls coming in on her radio – the control room asking her to respond to category one cases, the most life-threatening. She could not respond to any of those patients who needed her because she was stuck with her patient, waiting for a bed in a full emergency department. More than 11,000 ambulances a week are waiting in queues of at least an hour outside A&E units in England, according to the latest figures. The handover time should be 15 minutes.
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