Winter blamed as ambulance service misses critical target

A TARGET to reach life- threatening calls to the ambulance service within eight minutes was missed last year as staff battled the severe winter weather and rising demand.

The service reached 72 per cent of so-called Category A call within minutes in 2010-11 – against a target of 75 per cent and down slightly from 72.3 per cent the previous year.

At the Scottish Ambulance Service (SAS) annual review in Kirkcaldy yesterday, health secretary Nicola Sturgeon questioned ambulance bosses about what they were doing to ensure that they met the target in future.

The service said it had taken action to prepare for this coming winter as well as looking at how to increase staff and resources in areas struggling to hit the eight-minute target.

Figures showed that the SAS dealt with 145,681 calls last year assessed as potentially immediately life-threatening, responding to them in an average of 6.9 minutes.

But the target to reach 75 per cent of such calls in less than eight minutes was missed as vehicles struggled through blocked roads, while also facing rising demand.

When the period of severe weather was excluded, the performance for the year hit 72.3 per cent – the same as for 2009-10.

SAS chief executive Pauline Howie said: “It is always important to get those more life-threatening cases as quickly as we possibly can.

“While the figures look like we are flat-lining, that was despite us declaring a major incident for a few days last winter. That is also set against a context of demand continuing to increase.

“So, what we are doing to increase response times even further for those critically life-threatening patients is to enhance our triage systems so we can really target the resource at those life-threatening calls as quickly as possible.”

Ms Howie said that there were points in the year when performance did hit 75 per cent, when the service was not hampered by weather and other pressures.

But she said that there were some parts of the country where achieving the target was proving more difficult, and the service was investigating ways of making sure that the right staff and resources were available at the right times in these areas.

“It tends to be the remote and rural areas which are further away from the ambulance stations,” she said.

In these areas, the SAS has been developing First Responder schemes – where local people are trained to use life-saving skills while an ambulance travels to the scene.