Ambulance delays: 15 hospitals with the most ambulances left queuing outside A&Es

Thousands of emergency arrivals have been left waiting in ambulances outside hospitals or with paramedics in England because of delays handing them over to staff –  often for longer than an hour.

More than 28,000 (40.5%) of ambulance handovers at hospitals were delayed by at least 30 minutes in the seven days to 18 December, according to NHS England data. This was before the most recent strike by ambulance workers in England and Wales on 21 December - they are due to walk out again on 11 and 23 January.

Around 12,000 ambulance arrivals were delayed between 30 and 60 minutes, representing 16.9% of all arrivals, while more than 16,000 had a handover delay of over an hour, representing almost a quarter (23.6%) of arrivals at hospitals.

On average just over 4,000 arrivals were delayed at hospitals each day.

Handover delays happen when a patient arrives at hospital in an ambulance but has not been handed over from the care of the ambulance to A&E staff.

They may not necessarily have been left in the ambulance – they could have been moved inside A&E but staff were not able to receive them.

Patients are meant to be handed over within 15 minutes but if hospitals are very busy this can cause delays.

The figures also show more than 46,000 hours were lost to ambulance handover delays in the last week.

Here we reveal which hospitals had the greatest proportion of handover delays last week.

The analysis is based on the average number of ambulance arrivals and average number of delayed arrivals in the seven days to 18 December. Only hospitals with 20 or more arrivals have been included in the local breakdown.