Ambulances miss ALL ‘life threat’ wait times
GREATER Manchester’s ambulance service has missed all waiting time targets for life-threatening cases this year.
An MP has now demanded answers into the delay amid claims that passengers were being put at risk by emergency responses which fell well short of national guidelines.
The failures have been blamed on limited resources, ‘extremely busy’ hospitals – and mental health and social care cuts resulting in more 999 calls.
Ambulance bosses admit they are battling with pressure but say that every other ambulance trust in England is also failing to meet the target.
The figures have emerged this week after an inquest in Manchester heard from a senior manager at the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) who described how paramedics were struggling with high demand and underresourced hospitals. However, Graham Stringer, MP for Blackley and Broughton, said he was deeply concerned by the failure.
He said: “These figures are amazing. Constituents have come to me with a number of extremely serious cases where the ambulance service is failing. “It’s seems as though those cases are just the tip of the iceberg. There clearly needs to be an investigation into what’s going wrong.
“I’ve had a case where a constituent has been asked if someone was still breathing – and if they were it wasn’t an emergency. I’ve had people wait hours for an ambulance.”
In the year to April 2017, NWAS failed to:
Get a paramedic to life-threatening cases within eight minutes 75 per cent of the time – instead only achieving this in 68pc of cases
Get an ambulance to life-threatening cases within 19 minutes 95pc of the time – only achieving this in 89pc of cases
Get a paramedic to ‘potentially’ life-threatening cases within eight minutes 75pc of the time – only reaching 62pc. This marks a sharp decline on last year, when all the targets were hit by NWAS.
A NWAS spokeswoman said the service had faced a significant rise in lifethreatening 999 calls.
She added: “This position is replicated within other ambulance trusts around the country and it by no means unique to NWAS. Due to the nature of these conditions, the majority of these patients do need to be taken to hospital and this in turn adds to the intake within accident and emergency departments.”
She said pressure on hospitals meant longer waiting times for ambulance staff to handover care of patients, delaying their response to 999 calls.
She added: “We work very closely with our NHS colleagues and our commissioners as part of the wider health network – pressures on one service undoubtedly place pressures on another – but we have been extremely proactive in attempting to tackle these challenges.
“Our understanding is that none of the English ambulance trusts have achieved their targets in the same year.”
An NHS England spokesperson said: “The ambulance service is facing significant pressures partly because too many ambulances are dispatched to simply hit targets rather than attend to patients in need.
“For this reason we have been testing a change to the way in which ambulance services respond. These trials – an idea that has come from doctors and paramedics – are designed to get to the most urgent patients in the quickest possible time and improve the service.”