AMBULANCE crews in Oxfordshire are being prevented from responding to potentially life-threatening 999 calls because of delays in handing over patients at the county’s emergency departments.

In the 12 months to May, on average almost 24 per cent of handovers took longer than 15 minutes at the John Radcliffe Hospital A&E department, according to new figures, something that the NHS says should never happen.

And at the height of the winter crisis in December, patients were left waiting for a total of more than 150 hours in ambulances before being handed over to A&E staff.

NHS Improvement, the health service regulator, states that all acute trusts must always accept handover of patients within 15 minutes of arrival.

Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (OCCG) aims to achieve at least 85 per cent of handovers within the NHS timeframe, however, the John Radcliffe Hospital failed to meet the target once between May 2017 and May 2018.

The hospital’s best performance in terms of ambulance handovers came in May 2018 when 78.6 per cent of transfers took 15 minutes or less.

Unsurprisingly patient handover times slumped to their lowest in the winter months when in December the figure stood at just 62.9 per cent.

A&E and ambulance staff at the Horton General, in Banbury, also run by OUH, failed to meet the target between October and February.

The total hours of delay per month has reduced since a December high at both the Horton and John Radcliffe of 50 hours and 10 minutes and 156 hours and 55 minutes respectively.

Since then, the total hours of delay per month at the Horton has shown a slight increase. But the John Radcliffe has shown improvements, and is now at the lowest level since June 2017.

Acting director of clinical services at OUH, Sara Randall, said: “We are committed to providing the best possible care to patients who arrive at our emergency departments.

“We work closely with our colleagues in the ambulance service to take over the care of patients from them as soon as possible following arrival. We meet with the ambulance service regularly to discuss how we can continue to improve patient care.

“We are pleased to see improvements in ambulance handovers at the John Radcliffe Hospital for five consecutive months up to May and we hope to maintain these improvements.”

Head of operations at SCAS, Ross Cornett, said “We are really pleased that there has been an improvement in handover times at the John Radcliffe Hospital.

“Both the hospital and ourselves have been working together in order to ensure that we improve patient experience.”