AMBULANCE crews are wasting thousands of hours in accident and emergency departments as they try to hand over patients.

South East Coast Ambulance Service (Secamb) said it lost 7,950 hours at hospitals across Sussex, Surrey and Kent in January.

This was a 73 per cent rise for the same period last year, despite the service taking fewer patients to hospital.

Hospitals across Sussex have been under exceptional pressure this winter, as they try to deal with a surge in demand from patients with a shortage of available beds.

At Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust, paramedics had to wait more than an hour to hand over a patient 543 times in December and 302 times in January.

The long waits in A&E are having a knock-on effect on the ambulance trust’s services.

The longer a crew is waiting in hospital, the less crews there are available on the road to respond to emergency calls.

A recent report to the trust’s board revealed Secamb is continuing to miss its targets for responding to the most serious emergency calls, Red 1.

In January it only got to patients within the eight minute standard for 65.5 per cent of the time, potentially putting people at risk.

A Secamb spokesman said: “Handover delays at hospitals continue to be a significant issue for us across our region as delays impact on our ability to respond to patients in the community as quickly as we would like.

“We are continuing to work closely with all hospitals across our region to ensure patients are handed over as quickly as possible.”

Secamb says it is doing a lot of work to try to improve handover delays, including setting up incident command hubs in its emergency control centres.

These will become the focal point for all handover delays and aims to increase consistency in the way the service liaises with hospitals about the subject.

There are also plans for a hospital by hospital review of handover issues, which will be supported by NHs Improvement.

Secamb was placed in special measures last year after being given an inadequate rating by the Care Quality Commission.

Problems with meeting response time targets were among the issues of concern highlighted by inspectors.

The CQC is due to return to the trust for a follow-up visit in May.

The trust received severe criticism for a pilot scheme it introduced over the winter of 2014/15.

This involved delaying sending ambulances to patients transferred to the 999 operations centre from the non-emergency 111 centre.