Almost £60k in fines for New Cross

From the January to March this year, the Trust that runs the hospital in Wolverhampton was fined £39,200 by the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).

The Trust is fined every time people are left waiting for more than 15 minutes in an ambulance at hospital. This is because national guidelines state patients should be handed over in under 15 minutes.

The handover period is defined as ‘the duration from the time the vehicle arrived at hospital to the time in which the patient was handed over to hospital staff.’

In July alone, the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust which runs the city's New Cross Hospital, was fined was £5,600 whilst in August it was 14,600.

This fine is based on the fact that 48 patients waited between 30 to 60 minutes for handover to the hospital. This results in a fine of £200 per patient. There were also five patients waiting more than 60 minutes, resulting in a fine of £1,000 per patient. This is up from July which saw just 27 patients wait between 30 and 60 minutes and no patients wait more than an hour.

So far this year, the total amount the Trust has been fined is £59,400.

The number of ambulance journeys have also increased. From January to March this year, the number of ambulance journeys to New Cross was 11,714, up on the previous year's figures for the same period which was 11,418.

In July this year, there was 3,939, up from 3,768 the previous year.

Last month, there was 3,655 journeys in comparison to 3,591 in August last year.

The most the trust has been fined in one month since October 2016 was in January this year, where the fine was a staggering £85,200.

Figures from the West Midlands Ambulance Trust show that the longest recorded handover time from January to March 2017 was one hour and 57 minutes. In the same period 120 patients waited more than an hour to be handed over.

Gwen Nuttall, chief operating officer at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, said: “The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust always strives to provide high quality, safe care for every one of its patients and we work closely with the West Midlands Ambulance Service to ensure there are limited delays in hospital handover.

“We have recently re-designed a part of the ED department to increase handover space in the department and we hope this will help in reducing handover times.”