South West Ambulance service scraps eight-minute waiting time target for rural areas
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.