Ambulance response times worsen in April

Only in Monmouthshire did performance improve this April compared with April 2010, crews reaching 64.5 per cent of category A emergency calls in the county inside eight minutes.

In Newport, categoryAresponse performance was down less than one per cent, but in Blaenau Gwent and Caerphilly it was down 8.8 per cent and in Torfaen 7.9 per cent. But this April, crews have had to deal Wales-wide with almost 30,200 calls, a 13.7 per cent leap on April last year, and Gwent-wide the increase was even bigger.

There were 2,139 categoryAcalls in the county this April, 15.5 per cent up on the same month last year, equating to 288 more calls.

The April performance in Newport this year was the fifth best of Wales’ 22 local authority areas, the same as for April 2010.

But Blaenau Gwent’s performance slipped from 6th best in April last year to 17th this year, while Torfaen slipped fromeighth to 15th and Caerphilly from 10th to 19th.

In April 2010 the 61.6 per cent performance against the category A calls target put Monmouthshire last among Wales’ council areas, though in the context of poor performance for several years previously, that percentage actually represented a big improvement.

That improvement continued this April, with the 64.5 per cent performance ranking 13th.

Though performance also dipped slightly on that for March this year too, it remains well above the low points of December and January when extreme winter weather tested crews and the ambulance system in general to their limits.

But comparative annual increases in calls of 13.7 per cent cannot continue without further dips in performance and work is going on at health boards - to speed up handover times - and within the Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust to come up with ways of triaging emergency calls more effectively, as significant numbers of patients involved do not in the end require hospital treatment.