Dreadful rise in ambulance delays in England

Ed Davey has been in the media talking about worrying figures dug out by the Liberal Democrats* via freedom of information requests:

There’s more detail in this BBC piece:

More than 11,000 ambulances a week are caught in queues of at least an hour outside A&E units in England, a BBC News analysis shows.

The total – the highest since records began, in 2010 – means one in seven crews faced delays on this scale by late November.

Paramedics warned the problems were causing patients severe harm…

Alongside Cornwall, parts of Gloucestershire, Lincolnshire, Somerset and Bristol have the longest waits, Freedom of Information requests by the Liberal Democrats have revealed.

* Behind stories such as this one rest the hard work of staffers who do the actual filing of FoI requests and collation of results. Good work!

UPDATE: More ambulance service bad news here. And yet more here. This isn’t the only part of the system that’s failing badly.

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