Head of royal medical college admits she would consider ordering a TAXI to take an ill family member to hospital instead of dial 999 because of NHS’s ‘frightening’ ambulance crisis

A top emergency medic admitted today that she would consider calling a taxi or giving a lift to a loved one who needed to get to the hospital, rather than call an ambulance.

Dr Katherine Henderson, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, said she was ‘worried’ about family members who needed an ambulance being able to access one in a ‘timely way’.

The medic, who is also an emergency consultant at Guy’s and St Thomas’ trust in London, said she would be ‘looking very carefully’ at alternative ways of getting to hospital if a loved one fell ill, including taxis or getting a lift.

It comes amid an ambulance crisis that has seen some patients told to wait 15 hours for paramedics.

NHS England data today showed ambulance waits fell in April compared to March but were still higher than nearly all other months since records began.

Experts said despite the ‘small reductions’ in waiting times, patients are still facing ‘frightening waits’.

And serious safety incidents logged by ambulance trusts in England skyrocketed 77 per cent in the last year compared to before the pandemic, separate data shows.

Ambulance figures for April show waits for paramedics fell compared to March but were higher than nearly all other months since records began. Ambulances took an average of 51 minutes and 22 seconds to respond to category two calls, such as burns, epilepsy and strokes. This is nine minutes and 41 seconds quicker than one month earlier

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today program whether she would fear for herself or a loved one who had to dial 999, Dr Henderson said: ‘I would be worried whether it would be possible to get an ambulance to them in a timely way.

‘I would be looking very carefully at what alternatives I had but we shouldn’t have to do that.’

Asked whether this included getting a taxi or a lift, she said ‘exactly’.

Dr Henderson said: ‘This is more serious than we’ve ever seen it. We’ve never broken the commitment to get an ambulance to a patient in a timely way.

‘It’s part of the NHS constitution that we will get care to emergency patients without unnecessary delay.

‘And this is the first time in my career, over 20 years as a consultant, when that has become a serious issue.’

She warned ‘an increasing number of patients’ are making their own way to hospital, with the walk-in queue now including ‘patients who should have come by ambulance’.

This makes it difficult to know who is in the queue and how serious their illness is because they have not been assessed by paramedics who ‘are very skilled at helping us prioritise’, forcing to be ‘very, very vigilant’, Dr Henderson said .

She said: ‘We’ve got big queues, we can’t get flow out of our departments. The reason there is this problem, the underlying reason is that emergency departments are absolutely packed.’

Dr Henderson added: ‘We sometimes start the morning with more patients waiting to go up to the ward than cubicles that we have and that’s at the beginning of the day.

‘We can’t then get new patients in because we have no space. We end up with patients in corridors, we end up with patients in any clinical area that we can manage to put them.’

It comes as medics today warned the NHS ambulance crisis has led to a surge in avoidable deaths and injuries — with response times for emergency call-outs at record highs.

Serious safety incidents logged by ambulance trusts in England have skyrocketed 77 per cent in the last year compared to before the pandemic, official figures show.

They are cases in which an error or lack of…