Does mean ambulance handover time at emergency departments correlate with number of handovers per month?

Abstract

Background Busy periods, such as ‘winter pressures’ months, can create challenges for Emergency Departments (EDs) managing patient flow. This may increase risks throughout the healthcare system. ED patients may receive suboptimal care, some patients may remain in ambulances, sometimes for hours, whilst queued ambulances cannot attend other patients. In some EDs, ambulance queueing is relatively rare; in others, it is more common. As part of the STALLED study, we investigated any association between mean ambulance handover time and the number of monthly handovers. Methods We analysed publicly available ambulance collection data for English NHS Trusts between October 2023 and March 2024 from NHS England. We included all Type 1 Acute Trusts, excluding children’s hospitals, those with fewer than 100 handovers per month, and clear outliers. Results 105 Trusts were included (10 to 18 per English region). The number of handovers recorded per month varied between 716 and 8,404 with a mean of 3,090. Monthly mean handover time varied between 8 minutes, 45 seconds and 129 minutes, 6 seconds. Figure 1 shows a weak relation between mean handover time and mean monthly handovers. Conclusion Mean ambulance handover time is not obviously correlated with mean monthly number of handovers. Therefore, we propose the existence of deeper-rooted obstacles/challenges which warrant further exploration. It also remains to assess temporal patterns in more detail. While queueing is a problem everywhere to some extent, there is variation in how EDs manage it. Understanding these variations may lead to improvements in patient safety, health outcomes, experience, and costs. https://doi.org/10.1136/emermed-2024-999.35 This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/