MLAs have slammed ambulance waiting times in Northern Ireland as “simply unacceptable”.
On Monday there were 702 patients waiting in emergency departments across Northern Ireland, including 297 waiting more than 12 hours and 317 patients waiting on a decision to admit.
There were also 532 patients that were not able to be discharged despite being medically fit by 10.30am on Monday.
The Alliance motion on Monday expressed “grave concern at the pressure facing the Northern Ireland Ambulance Service, the impact on patients with life-threatening or emergency needs.
It also expressed severe concern that response times for category one, two and three calls to the Ambulance Service were missed in every month of last year, and said the Department has “failed to adequately address the causes of unacceptable ambulance times.
This includes workforce shortages and delays in admitting patients to hospital from ambulances.
The Health Minister Mike Nesbitt was urged to bring forward plans to increase capacity, including an Ambulance Service workforce plan and to support a new Clinical Response Model.
Speaking during Monday’s Assembly debate, Alliance MLA Stewart Dickson cited several recent examples of patients facing long delays.
“We saw a saw a snapshot of this on Friday morning, when it was reported that 19 out of 56 ambulance crews across Northern Ireland were sitting outside hospital emergency departments,” he said.
“The longest of which had been sitting for over nine hours.”
Beyond the statistics, he said it was elderly patients and distressed family members feeling the effects.
This included Mary Donaghy, who spent over seven hours in pain inside an ambulance outside Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital on Monday.
She had been injured in head-on collision after her car hit black ice.
Mr Dickson also mentioned another patient with dementia , Robert (88), who fell on New Year’s Eve and waited 40 hours before being admitted to hospital.
This included 23 hours for an ambulance to arrive, nine hours waiting inside the ambulance outside the Ulster Hospital’s emergency department and a further eight hours in the ED.
Mr Dickson added that an ambulance took nearly two hours to respond to a special needs primary school in an easily accessible urban area of his own constituency, East Antrim.
Describing how a child had fallen and broken his femur in the playground, he said: “Distressed staff in the school had to look after him with blankets in a soaking wet playground.
“That, in a situation which was most distressing, resulted in a number of 999 phone calls to the ambulance service (with one) being answered by an English call centre, which is the default backup situation when all other calls can’t be answered in Northern Ireland.
“That, in an urban area in East Antrim, is just simply unacceptable.”
