Almost 80% of ambulances across the country are waiting more than half an hour to offload patients.
The ‘turnaround’ time targeted by the HSE is less than 30 minutes.
But new information shows that this was only reached in 20.8% of cases last year.
Chief Executive of Lifeline Ambulance Service David Hall said many ambulances wait a lot longer than half an hour.
“I think it can go to any number of hours – multiple hours,” he told Newstalk.
“Anybody involved in the ambulance service will tell you – from anywhere in the country – that they’ve had a whole host of ranges of times from minutes, right up to multiple hours waiting for a handover of a patient and being able to release the ambulance back again.
“It’s probably the single biggest contributing factor to the response times – the knock on effect of response times of ambulances being able to respond.”
