Cardiff: Ambulances waiting over 50 minutes at A&E

Patients are regularly waiting more than 50 minutes in ambulances outside south east Wales A&E departments, reports the BBC today.

The Welsh Ambulance Service have revealed that, over the last three months, an average 106 vehicles a week have waited more than 50 minutes to deliver patients.

'Bed blocking' and people needlessly turning up at casualty is being blamed for the problems. But in February there were delays at two hospitals due to a shortage of beds to cope with the volume of 999 calls.

The University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff claim 160 of its beds were unavailable due to delayed transfers of care, and that the problem was getting worse.

In a statement, it also said a third of emergency patients could be treated by a GP or pharmacist. But often the patient is not the right person to choose where they should be treated, as they are often not aware of the all the treatments required for a particular injury.

The summer months are usually a quiet period for the ambulance service, but a spokesman said it has been encountering problems at major district hospitals.

Mike Cassidy, director of ambulance services in Wales, said how often and how long ambulances were having to wait varied.

He said that since February most serious patients had been admitted immediately while some less serious cases waited three to four hours "on occasions".

Lancashire: 'Give ambulances the money’ call

Campaigners have called for more funds after it was revealed that four out of ten ambulances should be taken off the roads - reports the Blackpool Citizen.

Cash-strapped North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) NHS Trust bosses can afford to replace only a fraction of the accident and emergency ambulances and rapid response vehicles which have reached the end of their shelf life in Lancashire.

Now officials from the NWAS public and patient information forum - the patients' watchdog - said the situation should not be allowed to continue.

Forum spokesman Salle Dare said: "Our concern, representing patients, will be to put pressure on the primary care trusts and Government to provide sufficient money to help overcome this situation."

The forum appreciated the pressures which the ambulance trust worked under, and the competing demands made upon the service.

But she added: "It is the Cinderella of the emergency services - when everyone thinks of the ambulance trust they then only think of accident and emergency but there are many different aspects to it.

"The new plans for the ambulance service, which serves a much greater role, attending to people at home and carrying out more diagnostic work, means that we need to have a modern service to meet these demands."

Number of trusts to be halved in health reforms

Ambulance and local health trusts are to be cut by half, the Government announced yesterday in its latest re-organisation of the NHS in England.

The Department of Health said the amalgamations would produce savings of £250 million a year to be diverted to frontline services but could not say how many jobs might be lost, reports the Daily Telegraph.

The changes will cut the number of primary care trusts (PCTs) from 303 to 152 and ambulance trusts from 29 to 12.

"At this stage it is not possible to calculate the number of job losses or associated costs of redundancies," a spokesman said.