Fall in A&E ambulance handover times - report

Patients are waiting shorter times to be transferred from ambulances to hospital A&E departments in South Yorkshire than last year, the ambulance service has said.

The county's five A&E departments all saw a fall in ambulance transfer times between April 2024 and November this year, according to Yorkshire Ambulance Service (YAS).

The Northern General Hospital in Sheffield saw the biggest reduction - from a wait of more than 35 minutes down to 17 minutes.

YAS said it had introduced "a structured, safe and timely process" for transferring patient care from paramedics to hospital colleagues within a maximum time of 45 minutes.

The ambulance service said in a report that "significant" progress had been made in cutting handover delays at hospitals through the introduction of a "transfer of care operating procedure".

"This has been developed to ensure patient handover takes place within a maximum of 45 minutes and helps to support timely patient handovers, which, in turn, supports rapid ambulance turnaround and preserves emergency response capacity", it stated.

The aim was to reduce risks to patients waiting for a 999 response, YAS said.

The average handover time across YAS from April to November 2025 was 19 minutes compared to the previous year where the average handover time was 29 minutes, according to the report.

Barnsley District Hospital reduced its waiting time from 21 to 18 minutes, while waiting at Doncaster Royal Infirmary fell from 30 to 17 minutes.

Meanwhile, Rotherham District General Hospital saw a reduction from 23 minutes to 16 and Sheffield Children's Hospital fell from 11 to nine minutes.

Anna Parry, from the Association of Ambulance Chief Executives, said the system was not a case of abandoning patients and that good quality care required "close collaboration" between ambulance service employees and those working in emergency departments.

"However, it is also imperative that the key reasons for the bottlenecks being caused at hospitals are addressed nationally, especially delayed discharge of patients who are fit to go home and gaps in social care that prevent many from doing so."

The national standard for patient handovers which emergency departments are supposed to aim for is 15 minutes, but the average handover time at hospitals for all English ambulance services is 30 minutes.

YAS said pressures across the health and social care system contributed to delays.

The government has previously said it was spending £450m tackling hospital waiting times, and that included 40 new same-day emergency care centres, which treated and discharged patients in the same day and avoided them being admitted to hospital.

It also said it would roll out almost 500 new ambulances across the country and proposed 15 mental health crisis assessment centres to help people avoid waiting at A&E departments.

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