BBC journalist Colette Hume waited eight hours with her partner’s father in an ambulance.
"This is the new normal," says the paramedic as he looks across the car park. I'm sitting in the back of an ambulance outside the emergency department at the Grange University Hospital in Cwmbran.
The ambulance was called just after 10:00 BST and Colette said they were brought to the hospital just after 12:30, this is her account.His blood pressure is stubbornly high, 156 over 114. An ambulance technician adjusts the cuff around his upper arm. Observations are taken and passed on. At 19:00 the paramedics and technicians begin to swap shifts, handing over their patients to their colleagues who will work through the night."Sometimes we come back on shift the next day and the same patient is still in the ambulance we left them in. It's dreadful.There's a fuggy, dense smell of diesel lying heavy in the air. I notice huge industrial fans and think they are there because of the promised warm weather.
Every space is taken by an ambulance or crew car, but a channel is left and it's here that this new ambulance heads for. There have been 1,700 ambulances a month waiting more than four hours outside A&Es over a 12-month period.Lee Brooks, the Welsh Ambulance Service's executive director of operations, said: "The issue and consequence of patient handover delays outside hospital emergency departments is well reported, as is the cause."
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