NEARLY half the ambulances taking 999 patients to Worcester and Redditch hospitals are left waiting to hand over their charges for up to an hour, new figures have revealed.

The so-called "turnaround" time for ambulances is improving - but it still remains an area of great concern, the county's ambulance service operations director Steve McGuinness told a meeting last week.

In the two months up to the end of March, some 3,234 ambulances taking patients to A&E departments were held up for more than 15 minutes waiting for medical staff to take over. Of those, 825 had to wait at least half an hour.

The delays mean ambulances are "out of action" for long periods unnecessarily, Mr McGuinness told a meeting of Hereford and Worcester Ambulance Service NHS Trust on Thursday.

The "turnaround" time is calculated from the time an ambulance crew takes a patient into the A&E department at a hospital to when the patient is "handed over" to a member of the medical team.

Mr McGuinness said: "The paramedics would not leave a patient without them being officially handed over to a medical staff member, and would not leave patients waiting in ambulances."

He said he had met with bosses at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to discuss ways to better manage the system and so avoid keeping urgent calls stacked up until ambulances are free.

Hospital Trust spokesman Richard Haynes said work was underway between the ambulance service and hospital managers to streamline the process of receiving emergency patients.

He added all patients arriving in A&E were assessed solely on clinical need and those arriving by ambulance were not given priority.