To ask the Minister of Health, following the March 2025 Northern Ireland Audit Office report Ambulance Handovers in Northern Ireland, to detail any action he will take to improve ambulance handover times.

The Northern Ireland Audit Office report underlines the seriousness and scale of the pressures facing health and social care services and I note the recognition that the root cause of delayed ambulance handovers is the wider severe health and social care system pressures and hospital discharge delays. Patients are waiting too long in ambulances outside our emergency departments as a direct consequence of poor flow in our hospitals and social care constraints, increasing the risk of harm to patients and also impacting on NIAS’s capacity to respond to emergency calls in the community.

While pressures manifest at the Emergency Department, flow through the system and getting those people medically fit for discharge back into the community remain significant issues, meaning that a whole system approach is required. Some progress has been made in delivering changes to services to meet the needs of patients and service users, such as the introduction of Urgent Care Centres and local Phone First services and the introduction of pathways for patients to access a range of services as alternatives to going to an Emergency Department, where this is appropriate.

It is important to reiterate that there is no quick fix and addressing the current situation will require sustained long-term effort, additional recurrent funding and support across the political spectrum.

However, I remain determined to find better ways to work as a system to tackle these complex issues. I have asked my officials to look at initiatives used elsewhere and they are engaging with the London Ambulance Service, to understand the model they have implemented with Trusts in the London area which have resulted in improved ambulance handover times. I have also initiated a series of winter planning workshops to identify solutions to the system flow issues that we collectively face. I attended the first of these events on 4 March and was encouraged by the engagement and enthusiasm from HSC leaders across the system. I expect to see better outcomes in advance of next winter, including improvements to hospital handover times.