Accident and Emergency Departments: Standards
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate his Department has made of ambulance handover times at accident and emergency departments in Surrey Heath constituency.
Answered by Karin Smyth
Surrey Heath is served by the South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust (SECAMB). The most recent National Health Service performance figures show that the average handover time in SECAMB is 18 minutes and 37 seconds. This is over two minutes faster than the same period last year.
Our Urgent and Emergency Care Plan for 2025/26 sets out clear actions to deliver improvements this winter and make services better every day, including reducing ambulance handovers to a maximum of 45 minutes, helping get more ambulances back on the road for patients, and reducing category 2 ambulance response times to 30 minutes on average. NHS England continues to monitor average hospital handover times, sharing data with regions to support focussed discussions and identify improvement actions with those trusts not achieving handovers in 45 minutes.
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