A HOSPITAL trust has been fined £12,600 for missing targets aimed at getting ambulances back on the road faster.

Health bosses want ambulances to transfer patients to hospital and be ready for the next call within 15 minutes.

Each time the handover time exceeds 30 minutes, hospital bosses are fined £200 - and the penalty rises to £1,000 if it exceeds an hour.

Bury Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), which oversees healthcare in the borough, were presented with a report on the handover performance at Fairfield, North Manchester General and Royal Oldham hospitals and Rochdale Infirmary, which are all run by Pennine Acute Hospitals Trust (PAHT).

In April, there were 63 occasions where the 30-minute target was missed at those hospitals.

The report said that as a result: "Fines will be imposed on both PAHT and North West Ambulance Service (NWAS)."

A spokeswoman for NWAS said fines would not be demanded from the service until the CCG has a scheme to improve the handover rate.

He added that the number of 30-minute target breaches fell to 35 in May and some of the incidents may be exempt from the figures as they are classed as "serious", such as when ambulances need extra cleaning.

NWAS claim that the problem stems from the increasing number of 'life at risk' 999 calls, which rose to 174,000 in 2014/15 compared with 158,000 the previous year.

The spokesman added: "This has had an impact by increasing demand on the hospitals themselves, which can result in ambulance crews waiting longer to handover the care of the patient.

"PAHT actively checks crew turnaround times each day and is working closely with our health partners and commissioners to ensure there is continued focus on achieving timely patient handovers."

PAHT's divisional director for medicine, Joanne Moore, said: "Making sure that patients are handed over promptly from ambulance to accident and emergency (A&E) staff is one of our key targets and the problems we experienced in April were due to the increasing number of patients who arrived at A&E by ambulance.

"We have been working closely with NWAS on this issue and there was a significant fall in the number of breaches in May."