Rural ambulance cover under strain
Top GP issues warning after death of teenager
SCOTLAND’S ambulance service is stretched and underresourced in rural areas, a former GP chief has warned.
Dr Ken Lawton has spoken out on response times as the parents of a teenage cyclist call for answers on why it took an ambulance 27 minutes to reach him.
The devastating delay came in March, when 16-year-old Keiran McKandie died after being hit by a car. Dr Lawton, a former chairman of the Royal College of GPs, said the ambulance service must be able to cover rural parts of Scotland.
His warning comes after the Scottish Ambulance Service missed its target to get to threequarters of life-threatening emergency call-outs within eight minutes.
Dr Lawton said: ‘When I was asking for an emergency ambulance at the start of the year, response times had clearly gone up. It is a service with increasing demands and increasing stress.
‘Everybody is stretched and there are not sufficient resources. I have big concerns that waiting times for ambulances have increased. The ambulance service must be one that is fit for remote and rural areas as well as cities.’
His comments follow a string of missed targets revealed in the ambulance service’s last annual report, which shows paramedics reached only 72.2 per cent of patients whose life was in danger within the eight-minute target.
The service failed to get 80 per cent of hyper-acute stroke patients to hospital within an hour of a call-out and failed to get to 80 per cent of patients in cardiac arrest on the mainland in eight minutes. In February, the Scottish Government was forced to veto plans for slower response times drawn up by the ambulance service.
It proposed calls about chest pains with abnormal breathing, in patients with a history of heart attacks, and people who had suffered falls, should be downgraded from ‘red’ to ‘yellow’.
This would have nearly douan bled response times from eight minutes to 19 minutes. But the Chief Medical Officer expressed concern and the plans were ‘paused’.
The Government is still facing demands for an explanation over the response time for Keiran, who died at the scene on March 20 after his bike was involved in a collision with a car on a remote country road in Moray.
It took paramedics nearly half hour to reach the schoolboy from Elgin, on the B9010 Kellas to Dallas road.
The teenager’s parents, Gordon and Sandra, asked for answers after learning that medics took nearly four times the Grampian region’s average response time of seven-and-ahalf minutes. They have met Health Secretary Shona Robison to discuss the issue.
Mrs McKandie, 46, said: ‘This is not about my husband or I, this is about Keiran. He was the one who had to wait for help when he needed it most.’
A Scottish Ambulance Service spokesman said: ‘Local crews were busy with other patients and the nearest ambulance was dispatched from Dr Gray’s hospital in Elgin as soon as it cleared, along with another crew from Inverness and an air ambulance helicopter. Ambulance teams in Grampian are busier than ever as emergency demand continues to increase.’
Miss Robison has asked for a report on Keiran’s death. She said: ‘In this financial year, the service’s budget has increased by £11.4million and we recently announced that an additional 1,000 paramedics will be trained over the next five years.’
‘We are trying to find out why’