More than half of UK ambulance workers see patient die due to delay in health services, study reveals
More than half of British ambulance workers across England and Wales have seen at least a patient die because of a delay in reaching them or overcrowding in A&E, a damning report has revealed.
The latest survey, whose findings were disclosed in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary, gathered data from 1,200 members working in NHS ambulance services, revealing another scandal across the UK’s crisis-hit National Health Service.
Around 53 percent of those surveyed were at pains to say that they witnessed a death due to delay, while another 30 percent were aware of it happening with a colleague.
About 76 percent of participants said that delays had an impact on patient care every day, and another 52 percent of ambulance staff said they had spent an entire shift waiting outside to hand a patient over to hospital staff.
“These findings are utterly terrifying,” said Rachel Harrison, the national secretary of the GMB union, which gathered data from participants.
“The delay and dilation of care that we see is just unconscionable,” Dr. Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM), told the Dispatches program.
The damning report comes on the heels of a separate study by the RCEM, which found that a patient dies in the UK every 23 minutes as a direct result of spending at least 12 hours in A&E, usually because they are waiting for a bed in the main hospital.
“We’ve seen patients this winter who have been harmed because of ambulance delays,” said Dr. Sanjeev Nayak, a leading stroke doctor.
“If they’re late, we cannot treat them, there’s very little we as doctors can do. A couple of hours’ delay means the patient can die or suffer disability,” Nayak added.
Apart from delays and shortcomings, which intensely risk patients’ lives, the UK NHS is also grappling with staff shortages due to repetitive strikes over pay and conditions.
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