A £250,000 unit designed to slash waiting times for ambulances outside Southend Hospital was closed - less than three months after it was opened

Southend Hospital’s ambulance handover unit opened at the beginning of November to much fanfare.

The £250,000 unit created 12 extra bed spaces to allow ambulance crews to drop patients off and return to the road in an attempt to cut down excessively long delays.

This problem had plagued for the hospital for months with some patients waiting upwards of 12 hours in ambulances before being let into the hospital.

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However, the unit was quietly shut down at the end of January, after the Mid and South Essex (MSE) NHS Trust - which runs Southend Hospital - reconfigured the emergency department making space for seven more beds.

Campaign group Save Southend NHS has criticised the decision to dismantle the units with patients still experiencing long waits.

“It seems they were just another temporary quick fix and knee-jerk reaction to cover up the demise of the NHS,” a spokesman for the group said.

“£250,000 equates to four senior doctors working in A&E for a year.”

The units have been dismantled despite the fact that, in the last week of February, 43 per cent of patients arriving at MSE hospitals waited at least half an hour to be transferred to A&E - way above the national average of 26 per cent.

In a joint statement with the East of England Ambulance Service, the hospitals trust said: “The Ambulance Handover Unit was put in place to deal with immediate winter pressures, with the expectation that this was a short-term and temporary solution to help us cope with demand.

“The expansion of Southend’s majors capacity in late January, where seven extra cubicles became available, meant we were able to see more people inside the hospital.

“The Ambulance Handover Units have now been removed as planned. We are now beginning work to remodel and expand Southend’s Emergency Department, following national funding, to create permanent extra capacity.”

The Echo has exclusively revealed a patient, who later suffered a heart attack and died, waited 13 hours in the ambulance unit before being seen by doctors.