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Some patients arriving in ambulances experienced delays of more than eight hours to get into hospital last month amid the surge in Covid-19 cases.
As previously reported by KentOnline, at times there were up to 20 emergency vehicles queued outside Gillingham's Medway Maritime.
During the difficult month, which saw the Towns and neighbouring Swale become the hardest hit area in Britain, the hospital was visited by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Noting the problems with ambulance handovers, inspectors issued a warning notice.
However, speaking this afternoon, hospital trust chief executive James Devine said the situation at the Emergency Department has vastly improved.
It was subject to the unannounced inspection on Monday, December 14.
Addressing a virtual meeting of Medway NHS Foundation Trust’s board, Mr Devine said significant efforts had been made.
Staff had driven down the length of time it takes for patients to be conveyed to the hospital since the visit.
He described how there were “significant delays” in December, “sometimes averaging up to four or five hundred minutes in ambulance handover delays,” but this was “not in all cases”.
Mr Devine said the average waiting time for ambulance conveyance had been reduced to 134 minutes by Sunday, January 17, and in the last week, this figure had been further cut down to around 40 minutes.
He said: “In some cases, we were in double figures of the numbers of 60-minute handover delays, and on the daily reporting review we have had, I think, now five or six days with no 60-minute handover days, and on some days no 30-minute handover delays.”
“We are seeing the same number of ambulances effectively; we have not seen any change in ambulance presentations so this is genuinely as a result of changes to some of our practices and processes over the past six weeks.
“Whenever ambulances arrive, it’s a very fluid discussion between SECAmb (South East Coast Ambulance Service) and the hospital front door about prioritising those patients and assessing their immediacy for emergency care, and of course when you are dealing with such demand, that prioritisation is literally minute-by-minute and we have continued to work with SECAmb in exactly the same way as we did in December.”
Angela Gallagher, the hospital’s chief operating officer, said the situation was still being managed as a “critical incident”, but “it’s definitely an improving picture”. The full CQC report is due to be published later this month.
Catherine Campbell, CQC's head of hospital inspection for the south east, said: "Inspectors undertook a focused, unannounced inspection of the emergency department. This was in response to risks around patient flow and concerns regarding ambulance handover delays.
"We recognise the tremendous pressures hospitals are facing but where we have significant concerns about safety we have a responsibility to follow these up.
"We continue to support services in their efforts to provide the best possible care in these challenging times while monitoring any risk closely.
"The report from our recent inspection of the trust will be published in the coming weeks.”
