News & Insights: Healthcare

“Long waits outside local Emergency Departments causing Deaths”

10 January 2025

BBC News NI reports this morning that the Medical Director of The Northern Ireland Ambulance Service (NIAS), Dr Nigel Ruddell, has advised that delays admitting patients into hospital emergency departments is leading to an increase in deaths. Dr Ruddell is also reported to have advised that the longer patients wait outside an emergency department, the more they are likely to deteriorate.

It has been noted that as of early this morning, nineteen of the NIAS’s 56 crews i.e. approximately one third were waiting with patients outside emergency departments. Dr Ruddell further advised that there was a “slow down in the flow of patients right through the system” and “There is no doubt that the pressures of the system are causing risk to patients and we’re working hard to try and balance that risk. Both ourselves in the ambulance service and our colleagues in hospitals recognise that this inability to get patients in, assess them and treat them quickly is causing harm, and the evidence would show that does cause a rise in increased deaths.”

Alarmingly this development comes as a number of other members of the medical profession and local politicians have also been increasingly vocal regarding the significant winter pressures on the health service in recent weeks. The Department of Health have also advised that longer-term solutions required sustained investment and reform.

This is hugely concerning news for both patients and those working within the health service alike and there does not appear to be any real prospect of the pressures on the health service easing within the foreseeable future.

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