Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
£30M TO REVIVE CRITICAL SERVICE
Chiefs want response times slashed 300 staff could be hired in overhaul
RADICAL plans to revive Northern Ireland’s ailing ambulance service have been unveiled.
More than 300 frontline staff would be hired under the £30million model to ease pressure on the vital resource.
The plans, which aim to slash response times, go out for consultation today.
Boss Michael Bloomfield said 999 crews will be sent to the sickest the quickest as part of the shake-up.
He added: “I think this has the potential to make a huge impact on people.”
quickly rather than sending the most appropriate resource.
The revamp would direct crews more appropriately to the smaller number of very acute emergency calls.
Mr Bloomfield said the measures would help staff who are under increasing pressure but insisted the plans were not about saving money or changing target times in order to meet them.
He added: “I think it is important to recognise the very difficult circumstances our staff work in.
“With the number of vacancies we have together with things like sick leave but in particular the increase in demand, a 50% increase in demand in five years for calls.
“That is huge, no service could respond to that, it means our staff are regularly required to work overtime, regularly do not finish their 12-hour shifts on time.
“If a call comes in a few minutes before their shift ends and it’s a category red, they will be sent on it and it could take two or three hours.
“It means they regularly do not get their meal breaks in the day.
“By being able to identify much more accurately patients who really need that level of response, that eightminute response, we will make sure our staff are targeted at those most effectively and be able to provide the more appropriate response for other calls. Unfortunately that does mean that over the last number of years, we have gone from, if you go back five years ago, we were responding to 72% of calls within eight minutes.
“It is now less than 50%, and it will continue to decline this year. It should not be any surprise to people that response times will increase unless we have both a significant increase in investment and a new model.
“If we simply put investment into our existing model it will get some improvements but it will not deliver the sort of improvement people require because the model is simply out of date.”