Ambulances ‘take up to 20 minutes to respond to life-threatening calls’
THE ambulance service in the South West is taking up to 20 minutes to respond to life-threatening calls, according to a report.
On average, it took just under 10 minutes for South Western Ambulance Service to respond to a category 1 call – but that is above the target of seven minutes when responding to a time-critical lifethreatening event requiring immediate intervention or resuscitation.
The figures – which comes from the ambulance’s latest integrated corporate performance report – show that the average response time for a category 1 call in August was nine minutes and 56 seconds, but that for 10 per cent of the calls it took at least 18 minutes and 32 seconds.
Since May, response times for the most serious ambulance callouts have been getting gradually worse, with the average standing at eight minutes and six seconds earlier this year.
And those waiting in an emergency situation – where someone is waiting with a potentially serious conditions that may require urgent on-scene intervention and/or urgent transport – could be left waiting for up to two hours, but the average is currently just under 54 minutes. This is well above the national target, which currently stands at 18 minutes for category 2 calls.
However, those waiting for urgent (category 3) and less-urgent (category 4) calls outs were waiting for much longer, according to the data. The average response time for a category 3 call in August was two hours and 41 minutes, but for ten per cent of the calls it took at seven hours and 30 minutes.
The report indicates there are several factors for the increase in response times, including rising activity levels, long handover delays and higher level of staff sickness.
It states: “Ambulance incident numbers across the South West throughout August continued to be significantly higher than historic levels.
“The Trust has been experiencing activity increases since the easing of lockdown measures in May 2021.
“Weekly incidents have been running at over 20,000 incidents for 18 consecutive weeks between May 3 and September 5, 2021.
“Over the previous two years, the Trust has only reported two weeks above 20,000 incidents both of which fell over the Christmas and New Year period in 2019 when activity is traditionally busier.”
The report states that the rise in call out has been reported across all areas in the South West and, for instance, for the week commencing August 30, activity was 24.4 per cent higher than the equivalent week two years ago (prior to the pandemic).
Peak activity levels were seen at the middle of July, the reports adds, when more than 3,600 incidents were seen at times. In August, “a large proportion of days” reported more than 3,000 incidents – while at the beginning of March daily incident numbers were below 2,500.
“To put these levels of activity into context between April 1, 2018 and March 31, 2021 the Trust only recorded 10 days where activity exceeded 3,000 incidents,” it continued. “From May 1 to September 6, there were 64 days with over 3,000 incidents including 25 days over 3,200 incidents.
“Over the past year the Trust has seen a substantial increase in the amount of operational resource time lost as a result of handover delays at acute hospitals in excess of the 15-minute target set for each patient handover.
“During July and August 2021 the Trust saw these delays increase even further above these already challenging levels.
“The Trust lost 15,690 operational hours to delays in excess of the 15-minute target in July and 14,726 hours in August. These substantial delays are severely impacting on the Trust’s available resources on a daily basis and the ability to deliver the national response time standards.”