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Ambulance response times falling short




Failure to meet serious incident target in last five months

SOUTH Central Ambulance Service (SCAS) is becoming increasingly reliant on help from the community first responders after missing response time targets to get to the most serious incidents over the last five months.

SCAS director of operations, Mark Ainsworth, said the trust was “very concerned”, having missed a government target to reach the most serious 999 calls within eight minutes 75 per cent of the time for the last five months.

“Although the target requires us to reach 75 per cent of patients who are suffering a cardiac arrest, stroke or other life-threatening injury or illness within eight minutes, our average response time to such calls shows that we are getting to 75 per cent of patients within eight minutes and 20 seconds,” he said.

“For those patients where we know we will not get to them within the eight minute target time, we are able to provide them with additional support and advice over the phone from
qualified nurses, paramedics and other clinicians who work in our emergency operations centre.”

Across the four counties served by the trust – Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire – an average, 40 Red 1 (top priority) calls were recieved per day.

“In order to support our response to such patients, as well as focusing on our own resources, we have recruited more volunteer Community First Responders and Co- Responders (such as from the Fire Service),” said Mr Ainsworth.

Despite increasing frontline staff by over five per cent since April he said: “gaps still exist in our workforce,” and had been filled by paramedics and technicians, supplied by private providers.



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