Ambulance staff have been instructed to leave seriously ill patients in hospital hallways if they are forced to wait more than 45 minutes to hand them over to emergency medical teams.
The move could result in patients being abandoned without being admitted in an attempt to reduce delays in life-threatening emergencies.
NHS England has claimed that this new “leave and go” approach would free up paramedics to respond more quickly to 999 calls.
Social Affairs Minister Stephen Kinnock said the policy was being implemented because it had “worked very well” in London.
However, emergency doctors today criticized the measure and warned that it could “risk the lives of patients.”
Ambulance staff have been ordered to leave patients in hospital corridors if they wait more than 45 minutes (file image)
London Ambulances began testing a policy in which ambulance crews did not wait for the hospital to be ready to receive a new patient, but instead notified a nurse that after 45 minutes they would leave. In these cases, patients were left on carts in the hallways and in the emergency waiting rooms to be treated (archive image)
Speaking on Times Radio this morning, Mr Kinnock said: ‘Where there are examples of systems that work, reforms that have been effective.
“We shouldn’t just close our ears to it, we should look at it and if we can make it work in a different environment then we should be open to it.”
He also told LBC that thanks to the “leave and go” approach, emergency service chiefs have been able to get ambulances back to urgent problems more quickly.
It is supposed to take less than 15 minutes for paramedics to hand patients over to hospital staff.
But overwhelmed hospitals often struggle to find time or even beds for new patients.
These delays in patient admission are one of the reasons why response times for category two calls, such as heart attacks and strokes, reached more than an hour and a half last January, when these should be answered in 18 minutes.
To tackle the problem, London Ambulances began trialling a policy where teams notified a nurse that after 45 minutes they would leave, if a delivery had not been made.
In these cases, patients were left on carts in the hallways and emergency waiting rooms.
London is not the only area that is changing the way patients are delivered. South Central Ambulance service this year launched its “sit-able” system, which allows patients with less serious injuries to go to A&E themselves (file image)
This scheme has reportedly been a success in the capital, with response times now reduced to half an hour and NHS England has begun advising services in other parts of the country to adopt the London scheme .
Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of London Ambulance Service, explained that before introducing the drop-off policy, they regularly lost up to 600 hours a day waiting to hand over patients.
But Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, says it is “not acceptable” to leave sick and injured patients without proper handover.
He added that emergency doctors understand that ambulances need to get back to the front line as quickly as possible, but said the delays were a symptom of wider NHS pressures.
Many doctors outside London are also against this measure.
Dr Rachel Clarke, an Oxford-based palliative care doctor, wrote on
“This does not solve the problem, it is passing the buck, putting intolerable pressures on my emergency colleagues and risking the lives of patients stranded in the corridors.”
Plymouth-based emergency doctor Ian Higginson also wrote in X, adding that the policy “won’t solve anything”.
He said: “Ambulance drop-off and drop-off policies will solve nothing in the long term and will obscure the lack of meaningful action.” Hundreds of patients die every week due to overcrowding in emergency departments. How about we solve the real problem?
London is not the only area that is changing the way patients are delivered. South Central Ambulance Service this year started its “sit-able” system, which allows patients with less serious injuries to go to A&E themselves.
A spokeswoman for NHS England said the policy had helped London speed up response times and that the NHS was “constantly looking for safe and effective ways to reduce delays”.
But it was recognized that different areas have different challenges to consider and that “a safe and complete handover of patients to emergency staff is essential.”