Report by Local Democracy Reporter – Lauren Monaghan
The region’s ambulance trust’s reliance on private ambulance services has grown in a bid to help tackle patient handover delays on A&E doorsteps.
East Midlands Ambulance Service (EMAS) is using 56 private ambulance service crews each day on average, new figures from February data have revealed.
The figures were presented to EMAS executives in a meeting on Tuesday (April 7) and reflect the ongoing pressures within the wider health service to try to keep patient care running effectively.
Ambulance services across the country spend money on private ambulance providers – who provide their own resources, paramedics, technicians and equipment – to help deal with increased demand in their areas.
Earlier EMAS documents show the pre-existing reliance on private crews to help cope with care demand, where the trust was using around 50 crews a day around April 2024, compared to its budget for 44 crews.
The trust’s spending on private ambulance services has also increased by nearly 30 per cent over the last three financial years.
In 2023/24, EMAS spent £13,347,000 on this area, rising to £14,509,000 in 2024/25 and sitting at £16,981,000 up until February for the 2025/26 financial year – a 27.23 per cent increase from 2023/24.
Board documents say the trust made the decision later in the most recent financial year to keep the number of private crews it was using at a higher level to help out its own crews and to “mitigate handover delays” and pressures at hospital emergency departments in the region.
In a statement to the local democracy reporting service, Ben Holdaway, director of operations at EMAS, said: “At EMAS we continue to see year on year improvements in our ambulance response times to patients.
“This is thanks to the efforts of our staff, leaders and volunteers, and ongoing partnership work across the NHS to reduce handover delays.
“This winter, we had more ambulances and staff responding to patients than ever before.
“Private Ambulance Service (PAS) providers work closely with EMAS to respond to our patients, adding to our provision of patient care during high demand. Our aim is to reduce reliance on PAS, as we continue to welcome more frontline colleagues, and vehicles, to EMAS.
“We are working on further improvements to our response times. With increasing demand for our services, discussions are underway with our commissioners to increase our capacity, so we can make those improvements much quicker.”
The trust says it ‘expects’ the number of private ambulance crews it uses will reduce in the current financial year, which began earlier this month.
Public documents from March 2026 reveal EMAS plans on spending at least £12 million on private ambulance services in 2026/27, around £5 million less than the year before.
In Tuesday’s meeting, the trust also revealed its hours lost to hospital handover delays – the time from when an ambulance arrives at A&E until when they hand the patient over to hospital staff – were the lowest in February 2026 since July 2025.
In February, it lost just over 12,000 hours, whereas the month before it lost more than 19,500 due to ongoing winter pressures.
