Warning about response time of ambulances in the northwest after death of woman

A coroner has warned that long waiting times at hospitals in northwest England are putting patients’ lives at risk by holding up emergency crews.

It happened after the death of Bobilya Mulonge, who called 999 on November 24, 2022 due to breathing problems.

She waited 72 minutes for an ambulance – four times longer than the 18 minutes the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) specifies for her category of emergency call – which “probably contributed to her death”, said coroner Lauren Costello.

A spokesman for NWAS said the service was “very sorry” that an ambulance had not been able to arrive sooner and that there had been “significant” improvements to the service since then.

A report by Ms Costello has been sent to the Minister for Health and NWAS, calling on the region’s health authorities to take action to prevent further deaths.

She said evidence uncovered during the investigation about ambulance delays had given her cause for concern.

“In my opinion, there is a risk that there will be deaths in the future if we do not take action,” she wrote.

Ms Mulonge, 62, lost consciousness during her emergency call and suffered cardiac arrest when paramedics arrived.

Her heart was restarted, but she died three hours later in Tameside General Hospital.

An investigation found that NWAS was unable to meet average response standards at the time of the emergency call. The main reason for this was that “ambulances were unable to access the region’s hospitals due to long waiting times at those hospitals.”

The service’s performance standards for Ms Mulonge’s call category required an average treatment time of 18 minutes, with at least 9 out of 10 cases expected to be within 40 minutes.

The autopsy report revealed that at the time of her call, the emergency services were dealing with a high volume of calls, which put them under extreme pressure and prevented them from providing their services effectively.

Dale Ollier, north-west regional organiser for Unison, which represents part of the ambulance service, said the backlog in transporting patients from hospitals was having a “domino effect” on emergency departments, leading to a “bottleneck crisis”.

“We have patients who could safely be discharged, but because of the lack of capacity in social care, there is nowhere to discharge them.”

Ambulances are working “at full speed,” he added, but delays have placed an “unbearable burden” on rescue teams, who are sometimes kept waiting outside hospitals for “several hours.”

NWAS has taken a number of measures to improve response times, including holding regular meetings with NHS trusts to discuss delays, deploying managers to support emergency departments in difficulty and grouping certain patients together, the report said.

Ms Costello said that despite these measures, delays continued to occur “because the service cannot operate at full capacity due to delays in ambulances leaving the emergency department”.

A NWAS spokesman said “significant progress” had been made in improving ambulance response times over the past 18 months by increasing the number of ambulances and staff.