Scottish Ambulance Service warns 126,867 hour-long handovers — Scottish Sun

The Scottish Ambulance Service said its hospital handover delays left 126,867 ambulance handovers in 2025 taking longer than an hour, a problem it rated as a very high risk. The Scottish Sun analysis of official figures showed those delays affected 35.7% of 355,593 handovers at hospital.

That meant more ambulances were stuck outside hospitals instead of back on the road for new calls. The service warned that the delay pattern was also linked to longer waits for lower-acuity patients and increased clinical risk.

Scottish Ambulance Service risk register

The service put hospital handover delays on its corporate risk register and said the issue was one of its biggest risks. It said the delays leave fewer ambulances available to respond to new calls, and warned that harm can follow when patients cannot access emergency departments or other hospital care within the time their condition requires.

The service also said harm can occur in communities when ambulances are still tied up at local hospitals and no unit is available for the next call. That is the practical pressure point for patients waiting on a response: the vehicle may already be at a hospital, but the next emergency is still in the queue.

Handovers in 2025

The 2025 figures show how often the bottleneck lasted well beyond a short delay. The median turnaround time was 49 minutes, but 30,672 journeys took more than two hours, 13,655 lasted more than three hours, 6,654 went beyond four hours and 3,197 ran for over five hours.

The same analysis showed the scale has risen sharply over time. Fewer than 1% of handovers took longer than an hour before the pandemic, compared with 4.6% in 2019, 13.9% in 2021, 26.6% in 2022, 27.9% in 2023 and 31.9% in 2024.

Hospital pressure and capacity

The Scottish Ambulance Service said the most significant constraint is not demand alone, but restricted operational capacity. It said hospitals are struggling to move patients through the system because of high bed occupancy and delays in discharging patients.

For readers waiting on an ambulance, the figures point to a system where the delay can begin after the crew reaches hospital and still shape the next call. The service’s warning is blunt: the longer the handover, the less capacity remains to reach the next patient.