South East Coast uses own care staff to reduce handover delays

The innovative move was introduced to tackle the problem of crews being delayed excessively at hospitals because they could not handover patients to hospital staff. This can reduce the number of ambulances available to respond to other emergencies.

While busy hospitals can ask that patients are temporarily diverted elsewhere, this can mean ambulances travel further and can make it harder for them to respond quickly to emergencies. Many ambulance services have struggled with the eight minute response time for the most serious cases: in February the ambulance trust failed to meet the 75 per cent standard in four out of nine PCT areas.

In early March SE Coast made the decision not to accept diverts and instead use ‘cohorting’ of patients with its own clinicians looking after patients at hospital until responsibility can be passed to hospital staff.

In the coming financial year, it is looking to introduce penalties when crews are unable to leave hospitals. These will be £200 for delays of over an hour.