ACCIDENT and emergency departments in Wales will have to focus on getting patients out of ambulances and into hospital - within 15 minutes.

While hospitals are already working towards this target, from April it will be mandatory and, in our view, it is necessary to get the hospitals to take the initiative.

At the moment it is too easy to let ambulances queue up outside A&E departments for hours on end while patients wait to be admitted.

Last year the ambulance service stated that patients were regularly waiting 50 minutes in ambulances parked outside A&E departments.

And who could forget the scenes outside the Royal Gwent Hospital, Newport, last year of the chaos caused by such delays as ambulance after ambulance had to queue up while waiting for available beds.

That was unacceptable for the individual patients involved but was also a glaring example of inefficiency.

With an over-stretched ambulance service struggling to meet its targets of attending emergencies, the sight of so many vehicles sat outside hospitals was perhaps the catalyst health minister Edwina Hart needed to take tough action.

Initially it might mean that patients are transferred from the ambulances to trolleys in hospital corridors but we are confident that hospital managers will take steps to avoid such a situation.

One of the major problems in Wales over the past few years has been the inability of the ambulance service to cope with demand.

This bottle-neck at hospitals has no doubt been a contributory factor and we believe it will make a difference.

This is the latest in a line of good initiatives from Edwina Hart, who seems to be a much more focused health minister than Wales has seen in the past.