Why not implement what we voted for?

A 12-year old girl dies waiting in a GP’s surgery for an emergency ambulance which takes an hour to arrive, in the capital city of Wales (Western Mail, September 13).

The inquest is told a faster response could have been life-saving. I almost cried when I imagined how the girl’s parents, family and friends must feel hearing that.

Neither the public, nor a GP can demand an emergency (Red) response - the ambulance service makes its own decisions.

In this case the GP was told twice that she couldn’t be sent a red, eightminute response target, ambulance, so that means it was an Amber response. And do you know what the target response time for Amber is? You don’t, because there isn’t one. According to the NHS Wales web site, Amber calls are “measured by the standard of care provided”, whatever that means.

From the perspective of the Welsh Ambulance Service Trust, this incident was presumable assessed as a success, the child’s death notwithstanding, because the standard of care provided was correct – once the paramedics and ambulance arrived (as far as we know).

This system was introduced in 2015 under the direction of the then Minister of Health, now First Minister, Mark Drakeford.

Getting rid of time targets which were consistently failed was intended to make the ambulance service look better. But some of the remaining targets are still badly failed.

One in five of Red calls take longer than eight minutes to arrive in Cardiff and the Vale, and it’s more than one in four across the whole of Wales.

Handover of patient from ambulance to hospital is supposed to be accomplished in under 15 minutes. More than half of transfers take longer, according to the latest figures.

The ambulance service is something we will all need for ourselves or a loved one at some point in our lives.

England still has response time targets for all four of their categories. The targets for their Category 2

– the approximate equivalent of

our Amber – is for the appropriate response to reach the patient within 18 minutes on average, and to reach 90% of such calls in 40 minutes. That would be an improvement on the service this unfortunate girl received.

When will we have a Welsh Government that will deliver the ambulance service we need?

Dennis Jones Newbridge