PATIENTS lining A&E corridors is a necessary evil and far better than the “unsafe” option of leaving them waiting outside in ambulances, Worcestershire’s health chiefs have claimed.

As the increasingly common practice of “stacking” patients in ambulances outside A&Es has come in for criticism from regulators and government health chiefs, bosses at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust have insisted the practice is one they would never consider.

David Flory, deputy director of the Department of Health, has written to senior NHS executives calling for a “zero tolerance” to delays in handovers from ambulances to hospitals.

 

He wrote: “There should be no doubt that the delays have an adverse impact on patients’ experience of the service and may increase risk to patient safety.”

And Monitor, the regulator of NHS foundation trusts - something Worcestershire Acute Trust is inspiring to become - has warned that hospitals that carry out “stacking” are risking “serious implications” for the patients they are supposed to be treating.

Accident and emergency departments in Worcestershire are currently falling well short of that four hour target, with the latest figures for February showing Worcestershire Royal recording 80.5 per cent and Redditch Alexandra 81.6 per cent.

But Stewart Messer, chief operating officer of Worcestershire Acute Trust, said the organisation would never consider holding patients in ambulances, both to protect their wellbeing and ensure that ambulances are released to respond to calls.

“We do not hold patients in the ambulances on the forecourt because we strongly believe it is clinically unsafe,” he said. “We move patients into A&E and sometimes this means we have to queue them in the corridor until they can be treated in the next A&E cubicle.

We work very closely with the ambulance service to minimise delays as we are acutely aware of the need to release crews so they can respond to the next 999 call.”

Chief executive Penny Venables added: “We feel very strongly that it is important, where we do have significant numbers of emergency ambulances, that they are allowed to offload.

“We believe it is safer for those patients to be monitored in A&E departments, no matter how busy, than remain in ambulances.”