Rural fears over time of ambulance emergency arrival
PEOPLE in the Cotswolds worry whether they would survive a serious condition like a cardiac arrest as it takes almost double for an ambulance the time to get out to them than in Gloucester. The more rural parts of Gloucestershire such as Forest of Dean and the Cotswolds have always lagged behind Cheltenham and Gloucester when it comes to ambulance response times.
This is due to the location of the county’s two major hospitals and the geography of the districts. But there is growing concern that the response times in the Cotswolds are getting worse as winter arrives.
It now takes 14.1 minutes to get out to someone suffering from a life threatening condition such as a cardiac or respiratory arrest in the Cotswolds while it’s 7.8 minutes in Gloucester. Such incidents need to be responded to in an average time of seven minutes.
The time it takes to respond to a serious condition such as stroke or chest pain has also worsened to 70.9 minutes from 46.7 minutes in September - the average response for these category two incidents should be 18 minutes.
There were 5,582 hours lost to handover delays in October, 186 hours on average per day, which is the most seen monthly in the current financial year to date, however both category two and handover delay times had been improving throughout the month.
County Councillor Paul Hodgkinson (LD, Bourton-on-the-water and Northleach) told health bosses on November 28 he was really disappointed to see the targets missed so badly in the Cotswolds. “It’s now 14 minutes for category one,” he said. “This is significantly up yet in Gloucester it’s seven minutes.
“There’s this really big disparity which has now got wider again. Speaking to residents, and I feel the same myself as someone who lives in a rural area, it is a worry.”
NHS Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board chief executive Mary Hutton said: “One of the areas we are focusing on is working with South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust and clinicians from Gloucestershire Health and Care to identify people who don’t need to be taken to hospital but an ambulance crew goes out to that person and it can be dealt with on site if clinicians go to that person,” she told the health overview and scrutiny committee.
“If we can manage more of that work in the community, we can then release more ambulances to respond to category one targets.”
A spokesperson for South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust said: “Any occasion where the care we provide falls below the high standards our patients deserve and rightly expect is unacceptable.
“Handover delays at emergency departments remain our single, biggest challenge. To ensure our ambulances are available to attend the next emergency call within the community, we need to be able to hand patients over within the 15 minute national target.”
Since 2020, SWASFT has increased the number of hours our ambulances are on the road every week from 37,000 to over 50,000 hours per week. In their emergency operations centres where 999 calls are received, they have paramedics and clinicians working to remotely triage patients and signpost them to alternative care pathways as appropriate which helps to avoid unnecessary attendances at hospital emergency departments.
Hospital handover delays are linked to patient flow through the whole health and social care system, for which the NHS and local authority are responsible, they said. Beds need to be available for new patients to be admitted into hospitals.