Nottingham hospital second worst for lost ambulance handover hours

Credit: LDRS

By Lauren Monaghan, Local Democracy Reporting Service

Nottingham’s A&E has lost more than 18,000 hours in ambulance handover delays since April 2025, performance data has revealed.

East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) executives gathered in their first board meeting of 2026 on Tuesday (January 12th) to discuss the trust’s recent performance, with some improvements noted.

Board papers revealed EMAS had lost more than 109,000 hours in handover delays between April 2025 and November 2025 – this refers to how long it takes EMAS staff to formally hand a patient’s care over to A&E staff.

The national standard for patients to be fully transferred from an ambulance to an emergency department is 15 minutes – EMAS records its lost hours within ‘pre-handover’ time that has gone above 15 minutes.

While EMAS has lost more than 109,000 handover hours, this is an improvement on the same time period in 2024 where around 123,000 hours were lost.

Within the current 109,000 service-wide figure, the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, run by Nottingham University Hospitals Trust (NUH), takes up more than 18,600 hours of it – meaning Nottingham’s A&E department has lost the second highest amount of handover hours in the region between April to November, 2025.

Leicester Royal Infirmary has lost the most in handover hours at more than 20,700 and Royal Derby Hospital is performing third highest with more than 13,549 lost hours.

QMC has dealt with sustained high numbers of patients in its emergency department, which was originally designed for 350 patients daily.

The QMC has recently been dealing with more than 500 patients daily in its A&E – a department originally designed for 350 daily patients – and in under three months NUH has declared two critical incidents due to service demand.

November 2025’s critical incident saw 24 EMAS ambulances waiting outside the emergency department and a further incident was called on January 13, 2026, with ‘pressures never seen before’ with more than 500 patients going through its emergency department a day.

These recent occasions of heightened service demand at Nottingham hospitals will have a direct impact on how quickly EMAS staff have been able to transfer patients into Nottingham’s A&E.

However, the implementation of the Release to Respond scheme at QMC around December 11th, 2025 – an initiative where ambulance staff have to handover patients within 45 minutes – has brought handover delay times down recently.

In November 2025, more than 3,200 handover hours were lost at QMC but this dropped down to 2,342 hours lost in December overall – showing some success in the 45-minute handover initiative.

Speaking about service-wide handover improvements at Tuesday’s board meeting, Ben Holdaway, Director of Operations at EMAS, said: “Once Release to Respond came in around about December 11 in four [hospital] trusts, and another the week after, our performance dropped to around 30 minutes.

“The plan was 33 minutes 47 seconds. Although we didn’t do it for a full month, from the 11th [December] onwards, when release to respond came in, we delivered at 32 minutes 41 seconds, so within plan.”