More Ambulance Services Than Ever Before Reach Life-threatening Incidents Within Target Time, UK

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 20 Jun 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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More ambulance services than ever before are reaching immediately life-threatening incidents within the government's eight-minute target response time, says a report from The NHS Information Centre.

Ambulance Services, England: 2007-08 shows that of the 1.8 million calls to the ambulance services that involved immediately life-threatening incidents, 77.1 per cent were attended within eight minutes during 2007-08. This marked a significant improvement on the previous year when ambulance services dealt with 74.6 per cent of such cases within the time.

Overall, the report shows 7.2 million emergency and urgent calls were made to ambulance services during 2007-08. Of these, 5.9 million (81 per cent) resulted in an emergency response arriving at the scene of the incident.

From 1 April 2007, both urgent and emergency calls (see Notes to editors) to ambulance services were assigned one of the following categories:

A - immediately life-threatening
B - serious but not immediately life-threatening
C - not immediately serious or life threatening.

The report shows:

a.. of the 5.9 million calls which led to an emergency response, 31 per cent or 1.8 million were classed as category A and 42 per cent or 2.5 million were classed as category B.

- the percentage of category A incidents that resulted in an emergency response arriving at the scene of the incident within eight minutes in 2007-08 is 77.1 per cent. This is the highest rate recorded and is 2.5 percentage points up on the previous year.

a.. ten of the country's 12 ambulance services met the target that they should respond to 75 per cent of life-threatening cases within eight minutes during the year.

a.. an ambulance capable of transporting the patient arrived at category A incidents within 19 minutes in 97.1 per cent of cases - compared to 97.0 per cent the year before.

a.. There were 4.26 million emergency and urgent patient journeys during the year - compared to 4.27 million during 2006-07.

The NHS Information Centre's chief executive Tim Straughan said: "The ambulance service provides the first point of access to health care for a wide variety of patients - ranging from those facing immediate life-threatening emergencies to more minor illnesses and injuries.

"This report highlights the significant improvements ambulance services up and down the country are delivering in terms of improved response times. Its findings will be carefully examined by ambulance services across England to enable them to see how the response they are delivering their local patients compares to those being provided by services elsewhere."

The report, which includes regional figures, is at : www.ic.nhs.uk/pubs/ambserv0708

Notes

1. The NHS Information Centre is England's authoritative, independent source of health and social care information. It works with more than 300 health and social care providers nationwide to provide the facts and figures that help the NHS and social services run effectively. Its role is to collect data, analyse it and convert it into useful information which helps providers improve their services and supports academics, researchers, regulators and policymakers in their work.

The NHS Information Centre also produces a wide range of statistical publications each year across a number of areas including: primary care, health and lifestyles, screening, hospital care, population and geography, social care and workforce and pay statistics.

2. Urgent calls

In addition to "emergency" 999 calls, ambulance services were required to take patients to hospital where a doctor, midwife or other health care professional identifies the need as urgent, e.g. a patient may visit a GP who then decides that the situation warrants urgent transport to hospital.

This request is often made via a separate phone line to the emergency "999" calls and previously would have been recorded under 'urgent journeys', rather than under 'emergency and urgent calls' as performance was measured on the proportion of such urgent journeys that arrived at hospital within 15 minutes of the requested time.

From 1 April 2007 these urgent calls have been prioritised and classified in the same way as emergency calls, to ensure that all patients are triaged appropriately and within the same response time target framework. This was a recommendation in Taking Healthcare to the Patient.

Consequently urgent calls are now being recorded and combined with emergency calls and time series comparisons of absolute numbers are not possible. However performance against response time requirements for Category A and B should not be affected.

NHS The Information Centre