ambulance times

This is a big story for our members in rural South West. It tells us:

People living in rural areas will officially have to wait longer for an ambulance than in towns, after ambulance bosses admitted they plan to create different response targets in the countryside.

Bosses at South West Ambulance service have told doctors in rural areas that instead of getting an ambulance or a paramedic to them within the national target of eight minutes for the most serious cases, they would have to set more realistic “trajectories” for hard-to-reach country areas.

SWAS Trust said it is still duty-bound to make the national eight minute target across the whole of its area, but would do so by getting to emergencies much more quickly in cities and towns, which would then average out the rural areas where they cannot.

One MP said people in rural areas were “being told to settle for second best” in what he described as a “cavalier approach” to people’s lives in rural areas.

Earlier this year, the Cotswold district in Gloucestershire was revealed to have the worst ambulance service in the country in terms of responding to emergencies, while rural areas of Wiltshire also have some of the worst response times in the country.

Wiltshire Council’s health scrutiny committee heard that less than two-thirds – 59 per cent – of all the more serious 999 calls to be made to patients in Wiltshire itself saw a trained paramedic or first responder arrive within eight minutes. In urban Swindon, 88.7 per cent of calls were met within the eight-minute target. Broken down into Wiltshire’s districts, the more remote Kennet area to the east of the county, the average wait for a response to the most serious emergency is 15 minutes – almost double the national target time.

Now SWAS Trust bosses have admitted that their strategy is to create their own internal targets with local doctor groups, which are longer for rural areas, with the aim that answering emergencies in urban areas will average out the response times. Another strategy is to install defibrillators in rural areas and train up members of the public and community first responders on how to use them, so they can save lives while cardiac arrest patients wait longer for an ambulance.

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.

This article tells how

Two MPs in Suffolk have criticised the ambulance service for achieving less than 30% success in response time targets in a number of rural locations in their constituencies in the county. The amazing response of a spokesman for the service is that these are regional targets and they are being exceeded in the urban parts of the region!

He further goes on to moan that delivering a 75% rate for all locations including rural places would cost a further £80 million per year. Now I am sure that there are some very imaginative solutions to this issue being delivered in other rural counties.

Just to my knowledge these involve: the first responder network, fire crews with defribulators and careful deployment of paramedics. Are all these things all already happening in Suffolk with me having got the wrong end of the stick?