Eight-hour ambulance wait times forseriouslyill patients
Almost 3,000 people needing emergency medical care waited more than eight hours for an ambulance last year in Scotland in the current NHS crisis.
Details obtained from a Freedom of Information request reveal that 2,974
patients suffered a painful eight-hour wait for emergency transport to hospital while more than 33,000 had a two-hour delay for help.
One desperately-ill patient, coded with the highest response time, waited a gruelling two
hours for an ambulance to arrive. The catalogue of crippling ambulance delays showed that one seriously-ill patient waited almost two hours.
Seriously-ill patients are more likely to die if ambulances are delayed, says the Royal College of Emergency Medicine. (RCEM)
Last January, the RCEM reported that hundreds of excess deaths were caused by ambulance delays.
Evidence links much poorer survival rates for patients who take much longer to transfer to A&E.
The worrying details on the state of ambulance response times was obtained by the Scottish Lib Dems. Leader Alex Cole-Hamilton MSP has called on the Scottish Government to support crews in their emergency call-outs.
“If you or a loved one find yourself in a moment of crisis, you want to know that someone at the other end of a phone line will be able to help,” he said.
“For high-risk callers to be waiting more than an hour for an ambulance to arrive on the scene is extremely worrying.
“The ambulance service has a phenomenally tough job. It is no surprise that they have been warning of pressure cooker conditions for years.”
The Scottish Government said: “We apologise to anyone who has had an unacceptable wait for an ambulance. We are committed to ensuring that there are no unnecessary delays in transferring patients to hospital.”