Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 23 October 2019.
Well, perhaps, Minister, part of the answer to this lies in what's happening in the minor injury units, and I look forward to a statement on that fairly shortly. But, in the meantime, I recently visited Bridgend's Princess of Wales Hospital to find out more about why the average time it takes an ambulance to hand over a patient is significantly longer than in other parts of Cwm Taf, and you may remember me raising this with you. Two things came to my attention—the first is that, while the patient may not be in the ambulance, they still remain in the charge of paramedics, in which case those patients are not added to the A&E waiting times, disguising the actual figures, and the second is—and I'm sure this is true of other hospitals—it's sometimes impossible to move patients to a ward elsewhere because there are medically fit people waiting to be discharged occupying acute beds while waiting for a care package, and that means that those individuals are waiting in A&E for follow-up medical treatment when they shouldn't be there. That's tying up A&E beds, and that means that the increasing number, as you say, of walk-in arrivals have to wait longer. The root of the problem still seems to be delayed transfer of care. You've invested in better working between health and social care so why aren't we feeling the benefits in A&E?