Ambulance handover times at Jersey’s Emergency Department are falling short of NHS targets – but the island has no set benchmark for how quickly patients should be transferred to hospital care by paramedics.
Over the past six months, only 78% of ambulance arrivals at the Emergency Department were handed over to hospital staff within 30 minutes.
In the UK, NHS guidelines set a target for 95% of handovers to be completed within this time – meaning that Jersey is falling short of this target by 17%.
The figures were obtained by Express through a request made under the Freedom of Information Law.
Between August 2024 and January 2025, a total of 4,147 ambulance arrivals were recorded at the Emergency Department.
Of these, 808 cases (19%) took between 30 minutes and an hour, while 93 cases (2%) took over an hour.
One patient faced a wait of 226 minutes – nearly four hours.
Despite these delays, Jersey’s Health Department has confirmed it has no official target for how quickly patients should be transferred from ambulance crews to hospital staff.
The department said: “There is currently no protocol, guideline or defined target time for ambulance handover to the Emergency Department, though work to introduce standard operating procedures is ongoing.”
In the UK, NHS hospitals are required to ensure all ambulance handovers happen within 60 minutes.
Delays can leave patients waiting for care and keep ambulances tied up when they could be responding to new emergencies.