West Midlands Ambulance Service boss warns it could collapse within months

An ambulance service boss has warned it could collapse within months as pressures cause avoidable deaths.

West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) is dealing with a "catastrophic situation" including long hospital handovers and delayed response times, its nursing director said.

Mark Docherty said patients were dying needlessly every day and predicted the service would fail by August.

NHS England has said £150 million has been allocated to tackling the issue.

A spokesperson for WMAS said: "The whole of the NHS remains under severe pressure and unfortunately handover delays mean some patients are waiting longer for an ambulance than we would want".

Mr Docherty raised his concerns in an interview with the Health Service Journal (HSJ) where he expressed fears WMAS could face a "Titanic moment" and called for NHS England and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) to do more to control the situation.

It comes as documents from a quality governance meeting at the trust in March showed another director warning that "deaths are happening which should not be happening" and nationally patients are being let down in a "catastrophic situation".

Mr Docherty said an increasing number of people were waiting in the back of ambulances for 24 hours before being admitted to hospital and that serious incidents had quadrupled in the past year, largely due to severe handover delays.

Across the country, NHS data for March shows ambulance trusts across the country missing targets, including too-slow response times to the most urgent incidents.

The report also revealed more than 100 serious incidents recorded at WMAS relate to patient deaths where the service has been unable to respond because its ambulances were held outside hospitals.

"Around 17 August is the day I think it will all fail," Mr Docherty told the HSJ.

"That date is when a third of our resource [will be] lost to delays, and that will mean we just can't respond.

"Mathematically it will be a bit like a Titanic moment."

In the past week, two families have spoken to the BBC calling for change after their loved ones died waiting for an ambulance from WMAS.

Mr Docherty said NHS England officials had downplayed tackling the problem of delayed discharge and questioned why the CQC had issued improvement notices about hospital corridor care, but not about handover delays.

WMAS raised its risk rating for handover delays to 25 in October, the highest in its history.

An NHS spokesman said has been "working hard to reduce ambulance delays".

Victoria Vallance, the CQC's director of secondary and specialist healthcare, told HSJ the impact of "escalating pressure on the NHS is severe" with "unacceptably long delays for patients".

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