North Shropshire MP, Helen Morgan has called on the Government for urgent action to improve emergency response times for residents living in more isolated areas in Shropshire.
Speaking in a Westminster Hall debate about ambulance response times last Thursday (March 6), the MP issued a warning about the impact of ambulance station closures on rural communities.
Speaking in a Westminster Hall debate about ambulance response times last Thursday (March 6), the MP issued a warning about the impact of ambulance station closures on rural communities.
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00:00I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Glastonbury and Somerton for securing this important debate
00:16and opening it with her usual thoughtful and well-researched contribution. Other Members
00:23have been largely in agreement in this debate. I do not think that is any surprise, and they
00:27have also made useful contributions, so I might just quickly run through them.
00:31The Member for Ilford South importantly highlighted the issue of burnout and the impact this situation
00:37is having on the hard-working staff in the Ambulance Service. The hon. Member for West
00:41Sussex highlighted the huge regional variations and the inequality of service for people living
00:46in very rural areas. The hon. Member for Redditch told a familiar story to people in Shropshire
00:52of long handover delays. My hon. Friend the Member for South Devon mentioned the importance
00:57of dealing with stroke patients. The hon. Member for Wolverhampton West, with whom I
01:04share West Midlands Ambulance Service for my constituents, has highlighted some of the
01:09concerns we have with that service as a whole. I want to take you back in time to December
01:152021, when I was first elected in a parliamentary by-election for North Shropshire. When myself
01:23and my colleagues were out canvassing in North Shropshire, it was extremely apparent that
01:27ambulance service delays were the No. 1 issue for my constituents all that time ago. Every
01:34canvass session we did, somebody heard an absolutely heartbreaking story of an ambulance
01:39delay that had led to a much worse outcome for a loved one or possibly even a death.
01:44It was an absolutely shocking campaigning issue to have to focus on, in all honesty.
01:55Almost a year later, after being elected, I completed a shift with West Midlands Ambulance
01:59Service in Shropshire. I was blown away by the professionalism, the dedication and the
02:04hard work of the ambulance crew. Suffice it to say, the delays were still as appalling
02:10as they had been a year before. Since then, there has been a huge amount of political
02:16turmoil, and I do not think that has helped with the situation. There have been four Prime
02:20Ministers, six Secretaries of State for Health and Social Care and two Governments, and I
02:25am afraid to say that we are still not seeing the improvement that we need.
02:29This winter, handover and waiting times were at a point where, in some ambulance services
02:32across the country, people who were suffering from heart attacks were being advised to drive
02:38themselves to hospital, and that is an unacceptable situation. The most recent available data
02:44for my local ambulance service in Shropshire—so just that rural element of West Midlands Ambulance
02:49Service—was up to December 2024, and it still paints a stark picture of the distressing
02:54reality facing my constituents and people across Shropshire. For category 1 call-out,
02:59the mean waiting time is 12 minutes 19 seconds, compared to a target of seven. For category
03:052, it is 50 minutes and 36 seconds, and the target is 18. That is for including people
03:11suffering from heart attacks and suspected strokes. For category 3, it is well over 200
03:19minutes, and the target is an hour. Even after we have seen some improvements in Shropshire,
03:25we saw some money secured for the local ambulance service after a long campaign of £21 million
03:30to boost emergency care, and we have seen some improvement, but those response times
03:34are still totally unacceptable. At times, there have been as many as 16 ambulances queued outside
03:39the Shrewsbury and Telford emergency departments that serve my constituents. Over one in three
03:44ambulances has to wait more than an hour to hand over a patient, and the longest wait was
03:50listed at an astonishing 17 hours. Even this week, as we approached the spring, I was told by a
03:56constituent who had stopped to help an elderly lady laying on a cold pavement with a suspected
04:00stroke that they had to wait nearly an hour and a half for an ambulance or first responder to
04:04arrive, all the while her breath became more and more shallow. This crisis is real, and it has not
04:10improved to a significant extent. When we look nationally, the Darzi report found that in 2024,
04:17around 800 working days each day had been lost to handover delays. However you cut that,
04:22that is unacceptable. 14,000 paramedics a year, 112 years, it is just not acceptable.
04:32So it is no surprise that people have lost faith in emergency health services as a result of the
04:36appalling neglect of the last government of the NHS, and the paramedics, nurses and doctors who
04:42go above and beyond in our emergency departments are stretched to breaking point and unfortunately
04:46starting to leave the service because of the burnout that they are suffering.
04:49So we are campaigning to end excessive handover delays by increasing the number of staff hospital
04:54beds and the impact of degrading corridor care, and we would like to fixate for a moment on social
05:01care. Crucially, the delays in A&Es that have been described are often caused by an inability to admit
05:07patients, because thousands of people are stuck in hospital every day when they would be better
05:13when they would be better cared for elsewhere. Bed occupancy is well above safe levels in
05:18hospitals and one in seven hospital beds are occupied by somebody who would be better cared
05:23for either in a care home or indeed in their own home. Meanwhile, local authorities such as
05:28Shropshire are spending as much as 80% of their budget on social care and are at risk of issuing
05:35section 114 notices, being unable to cope any longer. So it's really important that we get on
05:43with the cross-party talks on social care and with the Casey review, which we absolutely welcome in
05:47the Liberal Democrat party, but we must urge the government to speed up the timetable and crack on
05:53with this as soon as possible. 2028 is too late for a long-term solution for social care and the
05:59cross-party talks, as we know, which fell through last week, need to be reinstated as soon as
06:03possible and I urge the minister to encourage the Secretary of State to enact that as soon as
06:09possible. But let's focus for a moment on the rural problem and I want to imagine an ideal
06:15scenario where the issue of handover delays has been resolved, where the urgent and emergency
06:19care plan has been implemented and is successful and the 10-year plan has sorted out some of the
06:24other issues we have across the NHS. If you live near Oswestry or Whitchurch or Market Drayton in
06:29my constituency, the nearest community ambulance station has closed, the one in your town, and the
06:34nearest station or hospital is well over 20 minutes away and that's if the traffic is clear. Otherwise,
06:41if you want to have a category 1 or 2 response time within the target, you're reliant on a
06:47spare ambulance roaming free in your community, if you will, just waiting for that call to come in.
06:54And I think that's unrealistic, actually. I think we would expect and hope that paramedics in between
07:00calls, if they don't have a patient immediately to go and see, would have somewhere to go and
07:05have a cup of tea, maybe a sit down, maybe decompress from some of the awful things they've
07:09seen that day, and hopefully they will be going back to the ambulance station in between their
07:14call outs. And that's detrimental to the people who live a long way now from an ambulance station
07:20because of this centralised model that we have seen implemented across the country. It may well
07:25be efficient in urban areas, but it certainly isn't working in rural ones. And I hope the Minister
07:31would commit to reviewing the service that's received in rural places, because thousands of
07:36people in large market towns, Oswestry for example has nearly 8,000 residents, Market Drayton more
07:42than 12,000, nearly 10,000 in Whitchurch, these are people who might expect to receive an ambulance
07:48within the target time. I must urge her to commit to looking at the ambulance station provision in
07:53those areas. I also repeat my colleague's calls for the government to publish accessible localised
07:59reports of the response times and create an emergency fund to reverse the closures of the
08:03community ambulance stations which have already taken place. While I'm here can I just mention
08:08the Midlands Air Ambulance Charity, which does fantastic work across West Midlands and is one of
08:13the busiest air ambulance charities in the country. It doesn't have an NHS contract, it's entirely
08:18reliant on the contributions of people living locally and I wonder if the Minister might
08:23consider the statutory footing of air ambulance services on which we are so dependent, particularly
08:28when specialist hospitals might be a long way away and the air ambulance crew is supplying that
08:33specialist support to stabilise a patient either at the roadside or in their home where
08:40they found them. So finally this situation is unacceptable. I look forward to seeing the
08:46the urgent and emergency care plan. I hope it will consider the need of rural areas and I really must
08:52urge the Minister to look at social care because that is one of the key things we need to do to
08:57fix the crisis in the NHS. Thank you.