Debate contribution: Ambulance Waiting Times

Debate contribution by Ms Liz Kimmins on 13 January 2025.

MLA

Ms Liz Kimmins

Party at the time

Sinn Féin

Date

13 January 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Ambulance Waiting Times

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4738562

Read the official Assembly record

Text

In the past few weeks, we have, undoubtedly, seen some of the most harrowing scenes in our health service for many years. The impact of that has been felt across the North by way of corridor care, patients being stuck in hospital as they cannot be discharged home and the backing up of ambulances at emergency departments for hours, as others have said, and sometimes days due to the overwhelming pressure on the system. Whilst there has been a serious escalation as a result of the winter period, those pressures are felt all year round. Many of the issues that we are speaking about today are, unfortunately, not new. A perfect storm of increasing demand for emergency and unscheduled care — there was a 12% increase in category 1 emergency calls between 2022-23 and 2023-24 — along with chronic staff shortages across our health and social care workforce have led to capacity deficits in our hospitals and social care. That has meant that patient flow through hospitals is often at a standstill at the front and back doors. That impacts on ambulance waiting times at emergency departments and, more importantly, on response times, which, as we have heard in the past few days from Dr Nigel Ruddell, the medical director for NIAS, will result in deaths if the situation is not addressed. Sadly, a number of years ago, I saw such delays result in the death of a young woman in my constituency. People do not want to hear platitudes from us today, and they do not want to hear us talking about the same issues and going round and round in circles. They want solutions. The solutions are there. Paramedics and ambulance staff are held up in ambulances with very sick patients for hours on end instead of being able to do properly the job that they trained to do and that they love. Those very ill patients are often lying in the ambulance for two or three shift changes of ambulance staff before they get through the doors of an emergency department, let alone admitted to a hospital bed. The call handlers in the ambulance control centre are dealing with some of the most traumatic scenarios imaginable while trying to advise people on the other end of the phone, reassure them and keep very difficult situations calm while patients and their families wait on an ambulance. They all want us to produce realistic solutions that will ensure that patients no longer experience what can only be described as a less than adequate service. We all agree that the budget is not there to do everything that we need to do. We recognise that and acknowledge that the Minister undoubtedly has a very difficult job. We also need to recognise, however, that the key solution is external to our hospitals: it is in our social care system and in our primary-care and community services. As the previous contributor said, those services are fundamental to Professor Bengoa's vision of transformation. The longer that we are unable to progress his vision, the further away that transformation will be. We know that our budget will never tackle all the issues that we encounter here, and that is as a result of over a decade of Tory austerity. No matter how we dress it up, the Tories starved this place of the funding that we not only need but deserve in order to deliver the public services to which people right across our communities should have access. We must start to shift the dial. Some of the solutions to the problem are things that will help keep people, particularly our older population, out of hospital. Our acute care at home service — it is also known as Hospital at Home — is hugely successful in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust (SHSCT), for example. That trust has a really effective way of improving patient outcomes and taking pressure off our hospitals. I hope to hear more from the Minister about how the Department can work not only to expand that valuable service so that there is equity in accessing it across the North but to enhance it. Some other ways in which we can look to reduce pressure are by ensuring that GPs and other senior clinicians can assist with admissions, be that through direct admission by a GP rather than people having to go through emergency departments or through helping to triage patients in hospital to keep the flow moving at pace. Finally, social care reform is key. I acknowledge the huge amount of work that is being done through the social care collaborative forum. I hope to hear more about where we are at with that today, because we know that the issues will not be solved overnight, as much as we would like them to be. The recent crisis has, however, crystallised the need for us to move at pace on some of them. Doing so will undoubtedly have a huge impact across the board. I am not here to attack the Minister or to criticise him for things that are beyond his control in the here and now. As a collective, we will all work together. My colleagues, the Committee and I are keen to work with the Minister to deliver on the issues as soon as we can.

891 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:43 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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