Ambulance chief: how we’re fixing eight-minute target failings

Sep 19 2009 by The Journal

Ambulance response time figures released yesterday revealed crews are struggling to reach remote locations in the region within eight-minute target times. Today, Paul Liversidge, director of ambulance operations for North East Ambulance Service NHS Trust sets out what his crews are doing to improve the “challenging and difficult” issues.

THE ambulance service is an easy target for critics who point to response times in rural areas as a perceived “failure”.

Yesterday’s Journal printed one of these stories from a Freedom of Information request by the Berwick Conservative parliamentary candidate Anne-Marie Trevelyan. However, the suggestion that there is a 999 rural crisis which we cannot solve couldn’t be further from the truth.

There is no crisis in rural response times, but there are some very challenging issues that require a different solution to the issues we face in our cities and towns. In the same year that we are perceived to have “failed” in these rural areas, according to the FOI figures, we responded to 99% of all patients in the North East with a potentially life-threatening condition in less than 19 minutes. This made the North East the highest achieving ambulance service in the country. However, the geography of rural counties such as Northumberland, Durham and Cleveland presents difficulties to achieving our eight-minute targets, but we have already made a lot of progress.

We are commissioned by primary care trusts to respond to three-quarters of all life-threatening calls in eight minutes. However this target applies to all of Northumberland, Tyne & Wear, County Durham and Darlington and Teesside over the course of a year, not simply one city, town or village.

To put this in numbers – over the last year we have dealt with more than 400,000 emergency and urgent 999 calls; sent a response to 320,000 incidents and took just over 265,000 patients to hospital. Almost 90,000 cases were classified as being potentially life-threatening and we reached more than 69,000 of these in less than eight minutes. We exceeded our target to reach 75.6% of all cases in less than eight minutes.

This performance is a huge success for us and is a result of the tremendous effort made by everyone in the Trust. But it also highlights that there are occasions when we’ll miss our eight-minute response because of high demand in densely populated urban areas as well as rural areas.

We recognise that these are challenging and sometimes very difficult issues which will not be solved easily. The directors in this Trust took the decision some time ago to work towards achieving a 75% response to potentially life-threatening calls within eight minutes for every primary care trust area in our region and not just across the North East region, but this still means that for one in four potentially life-threatening cases will not get an ambulance response in target time.