Watford MP Dean Russell spent time with a crew from The East of England Ambulance Service to experience first-hand the issues facing paramedics in the region.
Speaking after his morning with the paramedics, Dean said “It has been a challenging period across the NHS with high demand and delays at many hospitals, including Watford General.
"To give this some context, on Tuesday 20th December 2022 EEAST received nearly 1,000 more calls than they would expect on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day – usually their busiest two days.
"Last week I welcomed Health Secretary Steve Barclay to Watford General and we discussed the need for paramedics to be able to do patient handover much quicker so that the crews can get back out on the road responding to emergency calls much sooner.”
Dominic Hughes Assistant General Manager said “It was a pleasure to welcome Mr Russell to Watford Ambulance Station for a ride out with crews. It is useful for MPs to see and learn about how our service works, particularly when we are dealing with the challenges of the winter period.”
The Government is working hard to reduce ambulance waiting times. NHS England has allocated an additional £150 million to address ambulance service pressures in 2022/23 and support improvements to response times through call handler recruitment and retention.
This objective is being backed by a plan to train and deploy more paramedics, and Health Education England has been mandated to train 3,000 paramedic graduates nationally each year. In addition the Government has agreed a £30 million auxiliary contract with St John Ambulance to provide surge capacity of at least 5,000 hours per month to help bring down ambulance response times.
