999 Concerns raised at waits of almost an hour for ambulances
THERE is concern over ambulance response times in the Cotswolds as it takes almost an hour to get to patients suffering from issues such as a stroke.
The average response time for a category two call was 51 minutes in January in the Cotswold District and 44 minutes in Stroud.
The target response time for such a call is 18 minutes but councillors are concerned that both areas are now seeing the worst response times since the start of 2023. For the most critical cases, where people are facing life-threatening injuries and illnesses such as a cardiac arrest, the target is seven minutes.
But in the Cotswolds it takes an ambulance 15 minutes on average to get to these patients. It is 12 minutes in Stroud District.
The latest figures were presented at a recent health overview scrutiny committee at Shire Hall. County councillor Paul Hodgkinson (LD, Bourton on the Water and Northleach) said he is concerned about response times in rural areas and asked ambulance chiefs what was being done to address the issue.
He said it was good they had reduced response times in Gloucester and Cheltenham. “The issue is the Cotswold figure has gone up again,” he said.
“We can see in the stats it’s 51 minutes for a category two on average in the Cotswolds and just under 15 minutes for a category one. This is such an old chestnut for me because residents do worry about it and they do get concerned.
“I note the figures for Stroud have increased too. It’s 44 minutes for a category two [incident].”
He said there is a clear difference between rural and urban response times. “I would really want to see progress on getting those response times down in rural areas.”
Chief executive John Martin told councillors that the South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust is committed to achieving the response times. He said they are commissioned on a regional level and acknowledged there is more work that needs to be done.
“Where we’ve got bigger populations, that’s where ambulances are,” he said. “That allows us to achieve our regional target.
“We do maintain cover over the rural areas as well. For us as an organisation the key continues to be our partnership working to reduce hospital handover delays, which frees up more ambulances, that means they are more in the urban and rural areas, which allows us to continue to improve our response times.
“The variation in numbers when we get down to those smaller geographical levels will be partly because there are less patients in the denominator so one or two adverse response times can skew those figures.”