Eight NHS ambulance bosses were awarded taxpayer-funded bonuses worth up to £20,000 this year, MailOnline can reveal amid pleas for ministers to call in the Army to tackle the service’s current crisis which has seen patients die in hospital car parks.
Stroke victims and heart attack sufferers have to wait for ambulances to arrive almost every hour.
Despite the shocking figures, it can now be revealed that senior executives at three trusts were given bonuses and pay rises during the last year.
West Midlands Ambulance Service’s chief executive Professor Anthony Marsh saw his salary increase by £50,000 to £235,000 in the year ending March. He also received a bonus of between £15,000 and £20,000, despite not getting any add-ons before the pandemic.
The NHS set targets for 2020-2021, and the service has seen its standards fall since then. Serious calls take longer to get through than they did in October.
Five directors took home bonuses totalling up to £60,000 at South Central Ambulance Service in the same year, while North East Ambulance Service’s chief executive raked in more than £15,000.
Today’s critics slammed revelations about bonuses. They called it an “insult” to taxpayers, and said that the public shouldn’t ‘feather’ the nests of top brass.
MailOnline was contacted by Daniel Boxall (media campaign manager, TaxPayer’s Alliance): ‘We continue to hear the health system is facing a cash crunch, and it’s not surprising that ambulance trusts are giving out generous pay packages such as these.
This is not only an insult for taxpayers but also for patients who are suffering from mismanagement. It is important that taxpayers spend their hard-earned cash on the treatment of sick patients, and not the feathering of the elite brass.
Ambulance service bosses were given bonuses worth up to £20,000 this year despite the current crisis in waiting times and handover delays that have caused patients to die in the back of vehicles. Map showing: Ambulance trust directors received bonuses and performance pay in an upper bracket in England from April 2020 through March 2021.
Graph shows: Ambulance trusts across the UK average wait times for the most serious Category One calls — which include cardiac arrest and seizures — across April 2020 to March 2021 (dark blue), the year for which the bonuses were paid out, and October this year (light blue), the most recent date data is available for
Graph shows: Ambulance trusts across the UK average wait times for the most serious Category Two calls — which include strokes and and people who have fainted and are unconscious— across April 2020 to March 2021 (dark blue) and October this year (light blue)
West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) chief executive Professor Anthony Marsh (left) received a bonus of between £15,000 and £20,000 in the year ending March 2021, increasing from nothing the year before. Helen Ray (right), chief executive at North East Ambulance Service, had the second highest bonus payment during the year, receiving performance pay of between £10,000 and £15,000
Yesterday’s data revealed Each year, 160,000 people are hurt by delays. The NHS target is for handovers outside hospitals to last no longer than 15 minutes — but the number waiting more than an hour has quadrupled in a year.
Sajid Javid was yesterday urged to call in the Army to deal with the burgeoning staffing crisis, which has already been done in Scotland and Wales to bolster their struggling services.
The crisis is not only due to staff shortages but also because of backlogs in patients caused by unprecedented demand and the pandemic. Doctors claim that patients delayed going to hospitals because of Covid are returning to the health system more ill now than they would otherwise be.
As the social care crisis continues to worsen, hospitals are also under increasing pressure. It is a sign that the ambulance problem will get worse in the months ahead.
Already, care homes had 100,000 workers short before the pandemic. Industry bosses claim that bed-blocking has become a greater problem because there is no place for patients to be discharged from hospitals if they are not yet medically able to go.
Helen Ray, chief executive of the North East Ambulance Service (NEAS), had the second highest bonus payment during the year, receiving performance pay of between £10,000 and £15,000.
Her salary was also bumped up 76 per cent from more than £85,000 to up to £150,000 during the period, the trust’s annual financial records showed.
This was despite the service having an average waiting time of more than 25 minutes for Category Two calls — which include stroke patients and people who have fainted — during the year, making it the second worst-performing trust in the country.
For calls that are of this level of severity, the NHS targets a wait time of no more than 18 minutes.
These numbers are even more alarming as Category Two wait times averaged 48 minutes last month.
The service, which looks after Newcastle, Sunderland and other areas in the region, did, however, have the second best wait time for Category One calls — which include cardiac arrests and seizures — at seven minutes 14 seconds on average last month.
For the most urgent calls, the NHS targets a response time of seven minutes.
NEAS chairman Peter Strachan said: ‘In accordance with the contract of employment, an element of the Chief Executive’s pay is on an earn-back basis dependent upon specific performance objectives set as part of the annual appraisal process, capped at £15,000 per annum.
“Having achieved these objectives, the Remuneration Committee approved payment for the 2020/21 financial years.”
South Central Ambulance Service’s six directors, who cover Berkshire Buckinghamshire Oxfordshire and Hampshire respectively, were awarded performance-related benefits the following year.
Due to handover delays, a line of ambulances waited outside Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham Saturday night.
Paramedics spent 96,000 minutes waiting in hospital for patients who were not eligible to be transferred to the hospital within the cut-off time of 15 minutes. Similar figures in previous years were not higher than 45,000 at September.
After sustaining a fractured hip from tripping over his dog, Grandfather Jim Rotheram (left), 89 was in an ‘absolute pain’ for hours while awaiting help.
While the NHS has always struggled to respond quickly enough for medical emergencies of Category 2, such as strokes, severe burns, and other serious illnesses, patients have been waiting almost an hour for an ambulance since calling 99 in the past few months.
Patients waiting for ambulances in Category 1, the most severe, life-threatening emergency, are also experiencing delays. This is well beyond the NHS’s goal of 7 minutes.
Around 28,900 ambulance handovers at hospitals lasted more than an hour in October in England this year — almost four times the 7,772 recorded in the same month last year. This was more than 10,000 than what occurred at the peak of the pandemic in January (17,137).
A record number of 999 calls were made in England in October with 1,012,143 urgent calls for medical help made. The average response time to these calls was 56 seconds
Emergency admissions to A&E departments at hospitals in England stood at 506,916 in September 2021, up from around 430,000 recorded every month in 2010. And a record 5,025 people had to wait more than 12 hours at A&Es in England last month from a decision to admit to actually being admitted — the worst performance on record. In comparison, in the past three months 2010, only one person needed to wait so long to get admitted.
Professor Helen Young, director of patient care, was awarded between £10,000-£15,000. Chief executive William Hancock and three others received bonuses of between £5,000-£10,000, while the chief operating officer was given one up to £5,000.
This service was the most efficient in reducing wait times for Category Two and Category One calls during the period 2020-2021.
These climbed to over 35 minutes and nine minute, respectively in the latest month NHS data are available.
South Central Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust spokesperson said that the salaries and bonuses for executive leaders are determined by an independent compensation committee. This includes additional pressures in an operational environment. They also consider attracting and keeping top-quality individuals to manage our complex organization and recognize achievements towards specific goals.
The 2020-2020 Bonuses recognize performance in a number of measures, despite Trust facing one of its most challenging years. They also recognise the Covid Response Service which was set up quickly.
“In terms of performance, all NHS organizations have very difficult days ahead. However, the executive team of SCAS will continue working tirelessly for the organisation in order to provide the best service possible for patients and create the most supportive environment possible for staff during these extraordinary times.”
WMAS also performed higher than most other services, with wait times of six minutes, 54 seconds for Category One calls and 12 minutes 42 seconds for Category Two calls in the year up to March 2021 — both of which met NHS target wait times.
However, it saw wait times go up above the October target to eight and 46 minutes, respectively.
After a year as the director, Professor Marsh was criticised for being high-paid and resigned in 2015.
He was combining the job with his current role at WMAS at the time for an extra £50,000 a year but left after EEAS was fined £1.2million for missed targets.
It led to then Health Minister and Suffolk MP Dr Dan Poulter calling him out for his ‘obscenely high’ £232,000 a year combined salary — £3,000 less a year then what he is now being paid for his work at West Midlands Ambulance Service alone.
WMAS decided to stop sending ambulances to nearly all Category Three — which are still classified as urgent and include chest pain and fainting — and Four calls this year under strain from the Covid pandemic.
According to the Health Service Journal, the service started diverting calls to other sources in July as part of a 6-month program.
It was slammed by staff members for forcing call handlers to have to play ‘Russian roulette’ with calls because of the lack of resources available — with the few Category Three calls that were being met having to wait as much as 20 hours, reported the Shropshire Star.
WMAS was contacted for comment. The service received an ‘outstanding’ in its latest Care Quality Commission (CQC) — the Government agency that inspects hospitals and care homes — report in August 2019, the only service to currently have that rank.
Yorkshire Ambulance Service (South West Ambulance Service), South East Ambulance Service South East Ambulance Service South East Ambulance Service East Midlands Ambulance Service North West Ambulance Service did not give bonuses to their directors.
London Ambulance Service’s annual report could not be provided because the auditor demanded changes. A spokesperson stated that. The previous year it paid out between £15,000 and £30,000 in bonuses to directors.
This comes as official data on Friday revealed the worsening condition of the NHS in England. The waiting list for routine care stood at 5.83million in September.
And ambulance response times soared to triple the national target in October — the latest dates the figures are available for.
As compared to the goal time of just 18 minutes, October’s average Category 2 response time was close to 55 minutes.
There was an increase in ambulance delays for the most severe Category 1, which is when patients are experiencing a serious life-threatening condition such as cardiac arrest or severe allergic reactions. This should have been completed within 7 minutes, but in October patients waited on average 9 minutes 20 seconds.