Considered response

At first blush, the proposal to delay the dispatch of ambulances responding to emergency calls may sound like a catastrophic, or negligent, policy initiative. When patients are hit by a life-threatening heart attack, for example, they want and need help to arrive as soon as possible. But what if that help is elsewhere, responding to a separate incident, one to which three separate emergency services teams have been dispatched, and where all three discover that they were not needed in the first place. Then, the proposal to take a little longer to evaluate the correct response begins to make more sense.

This is the upshot of an assessment of 10 million 999 calls: it might actually be better to extend the initial period in which responders must evaluate the gravity of the call and send help, from 60 seconds to four minutes.

Three minutes sounds like a long time, when life itself is at stake, but there are three lessons here. The first is that targets, while useful, can become ends in themselves, part of a box-ticking culture divorced from their original purpose. The second is that we are entering a world of big data, where the analysis of vast volumes of information may throw up new, and potentially counter-intuitive, ways of adapting policies and our behaviour, for the benefit of all. The third is that, particularly as demands on precious public resources grow ever more stretched, the implementation of such new policies will require an ever-greater job of communication and explanation – not always the forte of well-meaning governments. In other words, although the digital world may appear perfectly designed to make decisions easier, politics is actually about to get harder.