PATIENTS still face long waits stuck in ambulances or on stretchers in hospital corridors because of huge pressure on beds. say health chiefs.

Too many ambulances have to queue outside Worcestershire Royal Hospital’s A&E department until beds are ready, according to the West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust.

At a meeting of the trust’s board, communications director Murray MacGregor branded the situation “tragic and hugely frustrating”.

Forty-three patients waited longer than an hour to be transferred from the care of ambulance crews to medical staff at the Royal in October (the latest figures available) while 138 patients had a wait of 45 minutes to an hour.

It should take 30 minutes at the most to transfer a patient – the ideal target is 15 minutes.

The clock starts when an ambulance arrives at hospital and stops when it is ready to leave for its next job (including the time it takes for crews to clean the ambulance).

The average “turnaround time” for Hereford, Worcester and Shropshire was 25 minutes and 45 seconds for October, more than eight minutes slower than a year ago.

Ambulance crews failed to transfer 38 per cent of patients (758 out of 1,984 patients) to the Royal within the 30 minute target, the second worst record of the 20 acute hospitals in the West Midlands.

Only Warwick Hospital had a marginally worse record than the Royal last month.

Across the West Midlands, ambulance crews lost the equivalent of 1,200 working hours in October alone while they waited for free beds.

Rob Ashford, the ambulance trust’s chief operating officer, said the pressure was often greater than figures suggested as sometimes ambulances had to be diverted to other hospitals if local ones were full.

This means crews not only have to take patients further, which takes longer, but they then have to travel miles back to their local area to answer the next call.

“The hospitals are under extreme pressure. Diverting patients solves the hospital problem but lengthens the ambulance time”, Mr Ashford said after the meeting.

Worcestershire Primary Care Trust has already agreed to fund a hospital liaison officer for the rest of the year to help hospital and ambulance bosses co-ordinate turnaround better.

John Rostill, chief executive of the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, said Worcestershire’s hospitals were under “huge pressure”, with 2,398 patients through the doors of A&E at the Royal and the Alexandra this week alone.

He said: “If there was a simple answer it would be dealt with. We need to sit down with the ambulance authority and look at it and we will do. It’s huge pressure on the hospitals, not just beds. We have also been under unprecedented pressure over meeting our A&E target.”

The trust hopes to introduce 44 more beds at the Royal and the Alexandra by the beginning of January to relieve some of the pressure.