An urgent meeting is to be held to find 'radical' ways of tackling the prolonged delays faced by ambulance crews when they arrive at hospital accident and emergency departments across Warwickshire.

The matter was flagged up at a county council health meeting in November and ambulance chiefs repeated their concerns last month when it was revealed that waiting times had worsened with the forthcoming Commonwealth Games due to increase the pressure on the service.

At this week's health and wellbeing board meeting of Warwickshire County Council, chair Cllr Margaret Bell (Con, Hartshill and Mancetter) outlined some of the issues.

She said: "West Midlands Ambulance Service explained that the response times were not as those desired by the national objectives and came up with quite a few reasons why this was the case. Top of the list was hospital transfers, delays at the hospital door.

"This is a systemic issue, not about blaming anyone but about how we can work together to make sure this gets better. So I am going to formally ask that we hold a meeting with all the people involved in this – fire, police, acute hospitals, the ICS [integrated care system], adult social care and many more on the list."

Cllr Jerry Roodhouse (Lib Dem, Paddox) said: "This has been going on for some time but if we could ask what is going on with the Commonwealth Games because that is probably going to have a major impact on service provision within the West Midlands. There is no one party to blame but there must be better ways to work the system."

Cllr Bell added that 400 ambulance staff would be working at the major sporting event which is being staged in Birmingham and the surrounding area from July 28.

Dame Stella Manzie, chair of the University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust, urged that a fresh approach be taken to try to solve the problem.

She said: "I am very conscious that a number of us in this room, me included, represent organisations where our staff are working every day on the things that need to happen to help the ambulance service.

"My plea is that in the meeting, we are looking at new things we can do. The fact is that we all have lots of people working energetically right now on trying to resolve these issues but it has to be something a bit more radical because it's a bit like macrame – there are so many complexities. It's not just about the ambulance service, there's a whole web of other things going on."

(Image by Makizox via Wikimedia commons)