THERE has been a 50 per cent increase in the number of incidents attended by ambulances due to an improvement in handing over times at Mid and South Essex NHS Trust.

Across the Trust's emergency departments, performance against the four-hour standard a patient waits between attending A&E and a decision being made about their onward care or discharge was down from 67.5 per cent in August to 67.1 per cent in September.

But ambulance handovers have improved – in September the average time for an ambulance to offload a patient was 22 minutes, down from 25 minutes in August and the quickest time since February 2022.

In September 44.7 per cent of ambulances were handed over in under 15 minutes, and 84.9 per cent per cent under 30 minutes, which are both improvements from August. There were 253 ambulances waiting over 60 minutes, down from 460 in August.

The trust says this is leading to more ambulance conveyances – there were 6,463 ambulance arrivals in September 2023, compared to 4,262 in September 2022, a 51.6 per cent increase.

Andrew Pike – Chief Operating Officer for Mid and South NHS Foundation Trust said at an Essex County Council Health Overview Policy and Scrutiny Committee: "We have one big objective which is to reduce waiting times within emergency departments.

"That is obviously quite a challenge between the demand for ambulances and the demand of the public attending and the pressure of the discharges over the weekends and our staffing levels.

"But overall all of those components are in a stronger position than they were.

"A year ago that was not the case and what we have seen is a result of freeing up our ambulances – community response has gone up and year on year we are seeing a 54 per cent increase of ambulance conveyances to the hospital, particularly Southend where it is now not uncommon to have 100 ambulances coming each day."

He added the NHS instruction to hospitals is to get to 80 per cent by January – which he admitted is some distance from the current position of 68 per cent.

Mr Pike said: "The target we have distinctly improved on is the ambulance offload target where were are required to offload 90 per cent in 30 minutes, and at present, we can achieve 85 per cent so we are very close to achieving that target." He said winter funds are being used to expand the bridging service, which helps get patients home quickly and provides them with domiciliary care services while they wait for a care package from a local provider.

He said: "The fact we can now bridge discharge and we have now got an expanded hospital at home service is probably the two biggest reasons why together we have seen improvement in the discharge picture."

He added "Where we could work together more is what we could do at weekends with nursing home restart or nursing home starts – with the proprietors.

"We do find we get little or no patient discharge to nursing homes over the weekend and that causes a backlog queue."