Check your ambulance service: postcode lottery ‘costs 2,500 lives a year’
This article and interactive map are not pretty reading. I suspect they are particularly depressing if you drill down below the big geographies presented here, particularly for rural dwellers. They tell us:
Around 2,500 lives a year are being lost due to a “postcode lottery” in how ambulances respond to heart attack patients, a former service boss has warned.
Roger Thayne, former chief executive of the Staffordshire ambulance service, told the BBC that figures on response times and ability to resuscitate patients were “frightening”.
Data obtained by the BBC shows significant variations in the performance of England’s 12 ambulance services.
When adjusted for population, they show that the top ambulance service could be attempting to resuscitate three-and-a-half times as many heart attack patients as the ambulance service at the bottom of the table.
Mr Thayne said the figures exposed a health scandal and called for an inquiry into the issue.