Sheffield health chief asked if city needs second A&E department after 20 ambulances waited outside Northern General Hospital

Coun Sophie Thornton told a meeting of Sheffield City Council’s health scrutiny sub-committee yesterday (January 23) that someone had collapsed at work after suffering multiple seizures and when staff phoned for 999 they were told an ambulance couldn’t come.

She said they took a chance and transported the sick person to hospital by car but said that more than 20 ambulances were waiting outside A&E in the Northern General on that day. “Some had been waiting five hours, it was quite concerning,” she added.

Speaking during the discussion of a report by the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, she asked: “Can we be assured you can provide a safe level of care when 20 ambulances are waiting outside the Northern General?”

Later she asked: “Is one A&E sufficient for Sheffield? Do we need to look at the Hallamshire?”

Michael Harper, chief operating officer at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, replied: “We are absolutely clear there is work to be done on the whole system.

Improvements

“At the [emergency department] front door, where there are challenges there are very clear protocols in A&E to decide who has clinical priority, working with the teams to decide that there is someone who needs to be in the department.”

He said that a streaming system is showing improvements. A senior nurse now works with ambulances arriving at A&E at the Northern General to decide where patients need to be in hospital, in order to free ambulances up more quickly to leave.

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It was one of several improvements described in the ambulance service report, which said: “At Northern General, the average handover time for the year to date was 37 minutes and 18 seconds and an average of 48 ambulance hours per day were lost due to delayed handovers, which is the equivalent of five ambulances on a 12-hour shift per day.”

Mr Harper told Coun Thornton: “I think a single A&E is the right model. We have to manage it as a system.”

He described a range of work taking place across the whole hospital system, from using modelling to ensure that A&E can cope with the number of ambulances arriving each hour to freeing up beds in hospitals more quickly, getting patients into wards faster and making sure patients can access services in their communities.

Sorry

Mr Harper added: “We are ensuring that those patients that are in our beds are patients that need beds. We are making sure that patients are back at home as fast as possible and supporting them for care in the home as soon as possible.”

Adam Layland of Yorkshire Ambulance Service said: “I am very sorry to hear that experience. It’s not what we expect overall.

“We are doing what we can to make sure those experiences diminish as much as possible. There is a joint escalation ambulance plan, when experiencing significant demand or issues with handover, making sure that everyone is concentrating on safety and risk is averted as much as possible.”

He said that managers and senior clinicians can be called in to help assess and deal with patients waiting in ambulances, in collaboration with emergency department staff.