New Cross Hospital trust hit with £21k fine over ambulance waits
A hospital trust has been hit with a £21,000 fine after breaching ambulance handover targets again.
Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust has been penalised after almost 100 patients were forced to wait in ambulances.
It is the sixth time the trust has been punished for keeping ambulances queuing outside New Cross Hospital's accident and emergency department.
A spokesperson for The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust said: “Despite seeing increasingly more ambulances, our handover times are improving thanks to the hard work of staff from our trust and from the West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust.
“We always strive to provide the best, high quality, safe care we can for every one of our patients and we have a good working relationship with the West Midlands Ambulance Service which helps us provide the care our patients deserve when they arrive here.”
A total of 90 patients were forced to wait more than 30 minutes to be seen to be medics at emergency departments last month, with three patients left waiting more than 60 minutes.
Hospitals are punished for the number of patients left waiting in ambulances for more than 15 minutes.
The trust is fined £200 for each patient waiting between 30 minutes and an hour, with fines of £1,000 handed out for waits of more than one hour.
In May, the trust was fined just £2,000 for keeping only 10 patients waiting for up to one hour.
But hospital chiefs have claimed an increase in ambulance handover times was down to a rise in the number of ambulances arriving at its sites.
A report to the trust said: "Ambulance handover saw a deterioration during June 18 for both 30 to 60 minutes and more than 60 minute handover times, however, we saw a significant rise of 123 (3.06%) ambulance conveyance numbers in month compared with the same period last year."
Fines are collected by Wolverhampton Clinical Commissioning Group, which reinvests cash into the trust-chair A&E delivery board for Wolverhampton.
Cash is used to improve services and ease the pressure on the urgent care system, including provides money to volunteer groups supporting homeless and elderly people.
It is also used to bring extra staff in, such as hospital porters, and purchase residential home beds to avoid hospital admissions.
