Yorkshire ambulance bosses spend £10m to carry obese patients

YORKSHIRE’S ambulance service has spent nearly £10m on vehicles and equipment to transport obese patients, it was revealed today.

85 new ambulances which can carry oversized patients have been purchased in the last five years to replace older vehicles.

79 heavy-duty stretchers costing £8,000 each have been bought, as well as six wide stretchers which can carry patients weighing up to 50 stones, for nearly £14,000 each.

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Hospitals in Leeds have spent £140,000 on specialist equipment for patients, including hiring lifts and beds and buying wheelchairs.

Experts forecast that obesity levels in the UK will nearly double in the next 20 years, costing the NHS an extra £2bn a year.

Yorkshire has the highest percentage of obese men and women in England and the problem is growing more quickly in this region than anywhere else.

Each of Yorkshire’s 85 new ambulances, designed to nationally-approved specifications, cost £108,000 - a total of amounting to £9.2m. with the cost of stretchers added, the total rises to £9.96m.

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A spokesperson for Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust said: “Our priority is to deliver high-quality clinical care and transport for all our patients and this is just one way that we are developing our resources to meet the needs of the people we serve.

“All new A&E ambulances purchased as part of our routine cyclical fleet renewal are designed to a national specification and one of the features of these vehicles is that they have bariatric capability as standard.

“They are not specially built for bariatric purposes but boast such ability as one of their many features.”