Debate contribution: Ambulance Waiting Times

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 13 January 2025.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

13 January 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Ambulance Waiting Times

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4738601

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Unacceptable ambulance waiting times and a lack of capacity in the Ambulance Service are terminal symptoms of a health and social care system on the brink of collapse. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. The longer a patient waits outside an emergency department, the more likely they are to experience harm, and the higher the risk of death. The longer a patient waits for an ambulance after experiencing a critical illness, the higher the risk of death. This will sound like an obvious point, but it is one that is too often missed when we talk about patient flows through the hospital system and bed-blockers: we are talking about people here, and they should be regarded as such. We should remember that we are talking about people and that, on the Executive's watch, people are dying in ambulances, in our emergency departments and on the streets. On Friday morning, as we have heard, 19 of 56 ambulance crews were waiting with patients outside emergency departments. That is 19 crews that cannot respond to other emergencies in the community; 19 crews listening to emergency calls, desperate to respond but unable to do so. Years of political failure under the watch of various Ministers from various parties have normalised long queues of ambulances outside EDs and patients being treated in corridors, changing rooms and tea rooms rather than on wards. Annual winter pressures, as they are called, bring our healthcare system to the point of collapse year after year. That is not to mention the women who are forced to give birth in cars, on the roadside, because of a lack of support for them when giving birth. It is not possible to talk about ambulance waiting times and the crisis in our EDs without considering the wider issues. Ambulance crews are tied up at EDs because our EDs are over capacity; our EDs are over capacity because hospital wards are full; and our hospital wards are full because patients cannot be discharged back into the community in a safe and timely way. Last Sunday, as we have heard, more than 500 people who were medically fit could not be discharged from hospital. That was partly because of a lack of care packages in the community. There is a lack of care packages in the community because of a wider crisis in social care. The fact is that social care workers are simply not being paid near what they deserve. Some domiciliary care workers are not even paid for travel time between house visits. That is a scandalous state of affairs. Those workers provide life-saving, life-enhancing care to our loved ones when they are chronically ill or in their older age. A lot of that care is privatised, and the DOH funds that privatised care as well. Rather than investing in our health service, the Department of Health is throwing good money after bad, spending millions on private ambulances: since 2020, the Department has spent, on average, £10 million a year on private ambulances. Saving lives should not be a private enterprise. The Executive need to turn the tide in order to increase capacity in the Ambulance Service's fleet. That is the only reliable way to reduce response times and save lives, but, instead of increasing investment in in-house capacity, the Executive have overseen the widespread use of agencies to provide workers and of private healthcare facilities. That is exceptionally poor value for money that diverts resources away from the core funding of health and social care services. Instead of shifting the responsibility to individuals to mitigate the crisis in our emergency departments, the Executive should tackle the systemic issues that plague our health and social care system: chronic underfunding, a lack of planning and coordination and a failure to listen to the voices of workers on the front line. Until we value all health and social care workers properly and end, finally, the creeping privatisation of healthcare, we will not be able to solve the recruitment and retention crisis. We will not be able to fix the chaotic scenes in our emergency departments until we reverse the effects of years of chronic underfunding, plan and coordinate our services and listen to the voices of workers on the front line.

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

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

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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