Why ambulances should be a top NHS priority – leader comment

Ambulances are responding to just 61.5 per cent of life-threatening calls within eight minutes.

Ambulances at Glasgow Royal Infirmary (Picture: John Devlin)

It is the most fundamental duty of the National Health Service – to save lives.

However, MSPs were told yesterday that ambulances were responding to just 61.5 per cent of life-threatening calls within the target time of eight minutes. Holyrood’s Health Committee convener Lewis Macdonald noted that the proportion of eight-minute response times had “reduced significantly”.

Part of the reason for the fall appears to be a new system of prioritising calls, with Scottish Ambulance Service medical director Dr James Ward saying the eight-minute target had “lost its relevance to clinicians”.

Instead, he said medics were concentrating on getting to the “sickest people as quickly as we possibly can”. And this new approach had resulted in an impressive 43 per cent increase in 30-day patient survival rates, compared to the previous target-based system.

This figure suggests that the ambulance service is doing the right thing by its patients – given the resources at its disposal.

However, questions still remain about whether this is actually good enough, whether sufficient importance is being given within the NHS as a whole to the role played by ambulances. Dr Ward said the service was still “committed” to the eight-minute target; he did not argue that it was not worthwhile, simply that prioritising patients who appeared to be the most at risk was a more effective way of working than a blanket adherence to the target.

But this involves making some fairly big calls about the health of people who are in a life-threatening situation. In September last year, 65-year-old Jack Thomson died of hypothermia in his garden in Sauchie, near Inverurie, while waiting 90 minutes for an ambulance. Priority had been given to two other calls at about the same time and the ambulance service said later that overstretched crews had been dealing with an “exceptionally high level” of emergency calls.

Following an internal investigation, Macdonald, the local MSP, said that people were “bound to fear that lives will be lost if there are not enough ambulances to reach every critical case in time”.

Countless people are alive today thanks to the NHS. Many of us have reasons to be grateful. But if this good reputation is to be maintained, we need to be confident that, in the time of our greatest need, it will be there for us.