Patients facing increasingly long and agonising waits for ambulances

Responding to the latest NHS performance stats, Nuffield Trust Deputy Director of Research Dr Sarah Scobie said:

“The latest figures indicate just how severely emergency care within the NHS is struggling and how that is putting patients with urgent and life-threatening care needs at risk. No matter the reason for calling an ambulance, patients face increasingly long and agonising waits for it to arrive. People suffering from heart attacks or strokes are waiting on average nearly three times longer (52 minutes) than they should be (18 minutes). For other urgent calls, waiting times for one in 10 people have reached over seven hours, forcing many to make their own way to accident or emergency departments.

“The performance against important cancer targets is also bleak. Once again, the number of patients waiting longer than two months to start treatment after an urgent referral start treatment after an urgent referral rose to 5,961, the highest recorded.

“Throughout June, it has become clear we are in another Covid-19 wave. This increase in demand, coupled most recently with the extreme heat we are seeing and the adverse effects on people’s health, will impact health professionals’ ability to work through a growing waiting list, now at 6.6 million.”