A private ambulance service offering call-outs for £99 has been described as the epitome of the “two-tier health service” by Wes Streeting, the shadow health minister.
According to reports in the Independent, a new service will offer faster travel to A&E for those caught out by half-day waits for NHS ambulances.
The company’s chief executive Dave Hawkins, who is a paramedic himself, says he launched MET Medical after seeing his elderly relatives wait too long for NHS ambulance services following falls.
He said vulnerable patients waiting for an ambulance can wait up to 12 hours, with stats suggesting that ambulance waits reached a crisis point in the last year.
“It’s that moment when you’re out of options, it’s really a horrible place to be, particularly if it’s a loved one … It is a shame, like we’ve seen from the stats and everything, that the health service is failing us”, he said.
“The problems we’re facing in the NHS have built up over a lot of time due to increased demand, ageing population, and a lot of staff that are working in those busy environments.
“Even though most are caring and committed and lovely, people are overworked and are saying, ‘you know what, I’ve had enough’. I don’t know what the solution is to that.
“All I do know, if my family member is ill and I can’t get an ambulance I want to have a backup.”
According to estimates from the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, 34,000 patients were likely to have suffered harm due to these delays – this hit a high of more than 60,000 in December 2022.
The latest data shows 940,000 NHS ambulance hours were also lost to crews being forced to wait outside busy A&Es for more than two hours to offload patients.
MET Medical will still have to wait to deliver patients if they are seen as a priority, but it said its patients are likely to be lower priority and can be dropped at A&E without waiting for a handover.
The service will cover St Albans and Hertfordshire and has around 25 private ambulances, each of which will be led by paramedics.
Private ambulance services are often used by the NHS for non-emergency situations, such as attending care appointments.
However, MET Medical will be accessed directly by patients as a backup to NHS ambulance services if they face a long wait, and can take patients to private hospitals if they have insurance.
Ambulance waits
But it doesn’t protect patients from enduring long waits at the other end.
According to the last of this season’s weekly snapshots of NHS performance, one in four hospital patients in England arriving by ambulance are continuing to wait more than half an hour to be handed over to A&E teams.
The figure is down from around a winter peak of one in three patients, but suggests health services are continuing to face pressures from high demand and a shortage of beds.
There are also hundreds of people still in hospital with seasonal viruses, with the number of flu patients more than three times the total at this point last year.
Lack of beds
NHS England publishes weekly situation reports for hospitals from November to March every year, including data on bed occupancy, NHS 111 calls, ambulance handovers and virus cases.
The latest report – the final one for 2023/24 season – shows that 26 per cent of patients arriving by ambulance last week had to wait at least 30 minutes before being transferred to A&E staff, the same level as the previous week, but down from 30 per cent in mid-March.
The figure climbed as high as 34 per cent in late January.
Some 9 per cent of patients had to wait more than an hour to be handed over – again, the same proportion as the previous week, but down from 15 per cent at the end of January.
Handover delays of new patients can reflect a shortage of beds on wards, which in turn is affected by delays in discharging people who are medically fit to leave hospital.