THERE are 55 incidents every day of ambulance turnaround times exceeding one hour at hospital emergency departments across Northern Ireland.
Ambulance turnaround times refer to the time between an ambulance arriving at the emergency care department with one patient and 'clearing' the area, in most instances to pick up another patient.
A target of 15 minutes is the benchmark, but this was missed on around 140,000 occasions in the past year.
In almost 8,000 cases - the equivalent of around 55 a day in the past 12 months - the turnaround time was more than an hour.
There have been almost 500 instances in the year to October when ambulances took more than two hours to handover a patient and clean up the vehicle before setting off again.
Craigavon Area Hospital had the worst record, with an ambulance waiting for more than an hour at the emergency department on 2,028 occasions in the past year and for more than two hours in a further 170 cases.
It was closely followed by the Ulster Hospital in east Belfast, where there were more than 1,700 instances of an ambulance spending more than an hour at the emergency department.
A two-hour ambulance turnaround time was recorded on 127 separate occasions at the Ulster Hospital in the past year.
The figures were released by Health Minister Michelle O'Neill in response to a written Assembly question from Ulster Unionist Lagan Valley MLA Robbie Butler.
Mrs O'Neill said: "Information on the time taken to handover a patient at emergency care departments is not available.
"The crew will remain with the patient until they have been handed over to the relevant clinical personnel.
"The ambulance turnaround time will include other aspects such as the time to clean and replenish the ambulance for the next call."
Last month handover procedures at emergency departments came in for criticism at the inquest of a woman who died at Antrim Area Hospital after overdosing on dieting pills.
A Serious Adverse Incident report was produced by the Northern Trust following the death of Edel Houston (23), from Glengormley.
Belfast Coroner's Court was told that she was not attended to by triage staff until 45 minutes after her arrival at hospital.
A series of recommendations made included introducing tighter regulations on hand-over procedures between ambulance and hospital staff.
