Emergency care improves with top ambulance handover performance

Medway Maritime Hospital has made further improvements for patients requiring urgent and emergency care, by recording the shortest ambulance handover times in England this summer.

Figures released by NHS England show staff at Medway were the best performers against the key metric in the country from April to July 2024, with an average ambulance handover time of 12 minutes and 19 seconds, against the national average of more than 31 minutes.

This follows the launch of an ‘acute medical model’ at Medway in October 2022, which prioritises ambulance handovers, enabling rapid transfer of acute medical patients from the Emergency Department to wards, and promoting early consultant reviews. This work, underpinned by our Patient First improvement programme, crucially helps to get ambulances back onto the road to care for patients at need in the community.

Nick Sinclair, Chief Operating Officer at Medway NHS Foundation Trust, said:

“I am proud of the tremendous efforts by hospital and ambulance staff to make sure patients are quickly and safely handed over to our Emergency Department team. This is vital so that patients can get the care and treatment they need sooner and so that ambulances can get back on the road quickly to help others.

“This has helped us deliver further improvements in emergency care. Now more than three quarters of patients are seen, treated and discharged or admitted within four hours. This is despite sustained pressure on the hospital with more patients attending the Emergency Department than last year.”

A series of improvements in emergency and acute care has been a focus as part of the Trust’s Patient First improvement programme. This includes introducing new models of care, including a Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) for frail patients, and supporting systems, such as the TeleTracking bed management programme, that has helped reduce the time patients wait to be admitted to a ward bed from the Emergency Department.

Meanwhile the hospital has routinely been one of the highest performing trusts for emergency care in the south east region, consistently exceeding the national four-hour emergency care standard – up from 65.6 per cent in December 2023 to almost 80 per cent last month (July 2024), against the national target of 78 per cent.

Nick Sinclair, added: “Hospital staff continue to work tirelessly, together with our ambulance and community partners, to ensure patients get the care they need quickly, and to further reduce waiting times for patients, particularly those who need to be admitted to a ward.”