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In her interviews this morning Gillian Keegan, the health minister, said it was not acceptable for patients waiting for an ambulance to take them to hospital to be asked to get a relative to give them a lift instead.
As the Health Service Journal has reported, an internal note at North East ambulance service NHS foundation trust said that where there was likely to be a risk from the delay in an ambulance reaching a patient, call handlers should “consider asking the patient to be transported by friends or family”. My colleague Andrew Gregory has the story here.
I’ve actually asked NHS England to look at that particular case because that doesn’t sound to me like that’s an acceptable approach – people should be able to get an ambulance if they have a heart attack and that’s why we’ve put that extra funding in place, and why we’ve been building up our ambulance service over the last couple of years.
