Patients’ hearts stopping in ambulance queues for A&E

Patients have suffered cardiac arrests while waiting in A&E departments or in ambulances queueing outside because Scottish hospitals are overwhelmed, doctors have warned.

At least three cases in which patients’ hearts stopped beating while they were waiting for care have been reported to the Royal College of Emergency Medicine in Scotland. Some of the incidents, the college said, may have been preventable.

One frontline doctor told The Times that a patient with heart problems had died waiting in a queue of ambulances outside an emergency department. Staff could not take the patient inside because there was no capacity.

JP Loughrey, vice-president of the college and an A&E consultant in the west of Scotland, said that people who should be in resuscitation rooms with a team of experts and equipment to monitor their vital signs were instead lying in ambulances outside hospital buildings. He also said that tensions were growing between frontline staff and NHS managers in large hospitals because doctors and nurses, who were already struggling to cope, were under increasing demands to work harder to process more patients.

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Source: The Times, 19 January 2024