Ambulances forced to make 50-mile round trips to move patients 100 metres between hospital wards

AMBULANCES are making 50-mile round trips to transport patients just 100 metres between hospital wards.

The emergency vehicles are being drafted in from across Sussex to the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath.

It means people undergoing lengthy procedures are forced to wait several hours while busy paramedics see other patients before making the 40-minute journey.

The trust which runs the hospital said it has only happened a handful of times so far this year, but it means paramedics are racking up needless miles.

And one patient, who was having a scan following orthopaedic surgery, was disgruntled after spending eight hours on a trolley waiting for an ambulance to arrive to help take him between wards.

He told The Celeb Report Online: “A two-person ambulance crew arrived to take me 100 metres to a different building.

“The journey was less than five minutes – it’s just in another part of the same hospital.

“The scan only took 10 minutes. It was absolutely ridiculous.”

‘ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS’

The man, in his 80s, was forced to wait in “a tiny room like a cupboard” for the crew to turn up.

He said: “I was in there for hours. It felt like forever.

“They brought me some food, my evening meal, and left me.

“The ambulance had to come from Worthing all the way to Haywards Heath.

“The paramedics told me the porters can’t do it as it’s outside the hospital building and they are not insured.

“It was just me being moved back to the ward and I was their last job of the day.

“It meant the ambulance was out of action for any other jobs for all that time, plus all that hanging around for me.”

Ben Stevens, Chief Operating Officer at University Hospitals Sussex, said: “On rare occasions it is necessary to transfer patients between our buildings for clinical reasons.

“Where this is necessary, an assessment will be made to determine the safest method by which this is carried out.

“On occasion it is clinically necessary to make the transfer using an appropriately equipped ambulance vehicle with suitably trained healthcare professionals.”

A spokesperson for South East Coast Ambulance Service said: “Transfers between or within hospital sites are triaged in the same way as all 999 calls and our response categorised appropriately.

“We receive on average 3,000 999 calls per day and since January 2021, there have been only five requests for these transfers to be made at the Princess Royal site for patients who are often extremely unwell and who require clinical supervision or treatment during the transfer.”