AMBULANCE crews lost 29 days in just one month waiting to handover patients for care at Royal Bournemouth Hospital and Poole Hospital, the Daily Echo can reveal.

A Freedom of Information request to South Western Ambulance Service revealed crews lost 4433 ‘operational hours’ at both hospitals from January to September this year. This is the equivalent to more than six months of wasted operational hours.

The latest figures show a rise of 943 hours from the same period last year and an increase of 1172 hours from the same period in 2014.

Official guidelines state handovers from ambulances to hospitals should take no longer than 15 minutes but these figures are the number of extra hours spent at the two hospitals.

Delays occur when there are no A&E staff available for the ambulance crews to hand patients over to. Paramedics then have to wait with their patients meaning the ambulance is unavailable for 999 calls.

In the nine months, a total of 23,138 patients taken to hospital by ambulance faced delays longer than 15 minutes before being seen by accident and emergency staff.

In March alone, 362 hours were wasted handing over to RBH and 340 hours were lost at Poole Hospital - the equivalent of 29 days.

Poole Hospital and Royal Bournemouth Hospital said emergency departments are under ‘increasing pressure.’

Joyce Guest, chairman of Healthwatch Dorset, said: “Healthwatch Dorset has been told of many situations where local people, often frail and elderly, have been left traumatised waiting for over four to five hours for an ambulance. The long delays ambulance staff are experiencing at our local hospitals A&E departments is a major concern and has a knock on effect for anyone needing an ambulance across Dorset.”

Robert Talbot, medical director, Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust said the hospital is committed to working with the ambulance service to ensure delays are kept to a minimum but the hospital is under ‘particularly heavy pressure recently’ with attendances four per cent higher than the previous year. He urged the public to only attend the emergency department when ‘absolutely necessary.’

He said: “The emergency unit at Poole Hospital has been under particularly heavy pressure recently, with attendances four per cent higher than the previous year. This increased demand has put a great deal of strain on our services meaning some delays as patients are handed over to the A&E nursing team.”

A Royal Bournemouth Hospital spokesman said the hospital has seen a nine per cent increase in emergency attendances in the last year alone and is working with the ambulance service. He said the hospital exceeds the national four hour target for patients to be seen and discharged or admitted from ED and has been rated in the top five trusts for its efforts which is already helping free up crews earlier.

He said: “We have on average around 8,000 emergency admissions every month and around 2,000 of these come to the Trust via SWAST ambulances. Despite the number, we have still exceeded the national four hour target for patients to be seen and discharged or admitted from ED. We have consistently been in the top 10 per cent of trusts nationally and more recently in the top five per cent for this. This reflects the coordinated efforts across the Trust and with partner organisations. This is already helping with the handover of patients so that ambulance crews can be freed up earlier for their next task.”

A statement from South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SWASFT) said: “SWASFT is one of the best performing ambulance trusts in the country for minimising handover delays. SWASFT works closely with commissioners and the 18 acute trusts in our region to ensure a collaborative approach to managing pressures on delivering high quality emergency care. Handover delays are reported to clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) and reviewed on a monthly basis.”