Every Minute Matters: 15 steps to ambulance handover improvement

The greatest risk to patients is to those acutely unwell in the community with no access to clinical support. Delays in ambulance handovers have been a frustrating issue for us, our patients and hospital staff for many years. These delays stop ambulances from attending emergencies in the community.

In a bid to improve the safe hand over of patients at hospital, a new module has been launched ‘Every Minute Matters – 15 steps to improvement’. This is a national resource created by North West Ambulance Service (NWAS), for NHS trusts across the country to reduce turnaround times and improve patient experience.

The learning in the package has come from the ‘Every Minute Matters’ collaborative, where 14 North West hospitals came together with NWAS to improve their handover processes and increase patient safety. In 2017/18, prior to the start of the collaborative, ambulances spent 433,001 hours in turnaround at hospital. By 2020/21 this had reduced by 128,583 to 304,418 hours, a reduction of 29.7%.

The module is split into 15 steps, which are the 15 key learning points from Every Minute Matters. The content can be viewed in any order dependant on your individual interest. Each of the 15 steps contains patient stories, case studies from hospital improvement successes, QI content, introductory pieces, resources and top tips from NWAS and hospital staff, all to inspire and share ideas for how to progress ambulance handover improvements locally. Powerful staff and patient stories are within the content which emphasise the importance of having crews available to attend to emergency patients in the community and not be held up at hospital.