Paramedics in England cannot respond to 117,000 urgent 999 calls every month because they are stuck outside hospitals looking after patients, figures show.
The amount of time ambulance crews had to wait outside A&E units meant they were unavailable to attend almost one in six incidents.
Long delays in handing patients over to A&E staff meant 38,000 people may have been harmed last month alone – one in seven of the 292,000 who had to wait at least 15 minutes.
Of those left at risk of harm, 4,100 suffered potential “severe harm”, according to the bosses of England’s ambulance services.
The figures come after the Care Quality Commission warned in its annual report that the NHS was “gridlocked” and “in crisis” and that health service bosses feared long waits for care were so common that the risk of harm to those affected is “a worrying new status quo”.
The data published by the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) showed crews were unavailable to attend about 4,000 incidents a day in September – about one in six of all 999 calls – because they were delayed for at least 15 minutes with a patient outside a hospital.
One patient had to wait 26 hours before they were admitted to A&E to start treatment – the longest delay ever recorded.
Reports on Friday said an unidentified patient died of a cardiac arrest in the back of an ambulance outside Fairfield general hospital in Bury, Greater Manchester, on Tuesday. The hospital and North West ambulance service are investigating.
AACE’s latest monthly statistical report on handover delays also showed that in September:
673 patients had to wait 10 hours or more to be handed over to A&E staff – NHS guidelines say no one should wait more than 15 minutes.
45,000 patients were delayed for at least an hour and 21,000 for at least two hours – just under the highest numbers ever seen.
While crews spent 558,000 hours attending incidents, they were unable to complete another 117,000 “job cycles”, which equates to 21% of total ambulance capacity – huge rises on the 45,000 job cycles or 7% of capacity in October 2019.
Martin Flaherty, AACE’s chief executive, said: “Our new data proves that hundreds of thousands of hours are being wasted each month by unnecessary handover delays at emergency departments. In short, the situation has continued to deteriorate and is having an intolerable impact on our patients and staff.
“These unprecedented delays at hospital emergency departments are a twin threat. They cause significant harm to patients who are forced to wait in the back of our ambulances, while those resources are tied up and therefore unable to respond to patients who need us out in the community.”
Dr Adrian Boyle, the president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, which represents A&E doctors, on Friday urged ministers and NHS bosses to take decisive action to reduce the NHS’s overload.
“The urgent and emergency care system is failing patients and failing in its core function. Patients face long waits for an ambulance to arrive, long waits in emergency departments and long waits for a bed. The NHS crisis demands leadership and requires decisions to be made to ensure the safety of patients.”
Ambulance services are struggling to deal with record numbers of 999 calls. For example, between June and August crews dealt with 237,000 category one incidents, which involved a life-threatening emergency – a third higher than in the same period in 2019.
An NHS spokesperson said: “The NHS has announced plans to enable quicker handover of patients so ambulances can get back on the road and respond to calls, along with a new falls response service, recruitment of extra call handlers and measures to speed up discharge, but the public can help us by making the most of services like 111 online or local pharmacies and only calling 999 if it is a life-threatening emergency.”
