Urgent and Emergency Services
Across the country, weve seen a significant increase in demand for ambulance services over the year, which has been problematic as a result of both increased staff absence, particularly as a result of COVID-19 and rising handover delays at hospitals. This resulted in extended response times beyond our expectations. In recent months (Feb - Apr 2022) 18.78% of our ambulances had been delayed for over one hour in handing over our patients, rather than the 15 minutes national target.
We continued to deliver our services through integration with our wider health and care colleagues across the region and a strategically co-ordinated approach. This past year saw our service respond to 999 emergency service delivery as we have never seen before.
999 Emergency Calls
We received 1,040,424 calls to our Ambulance Operation Centres last year which was 253,208 more than the year before. 2021 marked the busiest year on record in the NHS for the number of 999 calls.
All 999 emergency calls are answered by our dedicated call handling colleagues in any one of our three Ambulance Operation Centres. We have automated built in resilience and flexibility where if all the call handlers in one centre are already on 999 calls, the next call will automatically divert to an available call handler in another one of our centres.
Of the 806,061 incidents we attended, 11.6% of these (93,479) were categorised as the highest priority, immediately life threatening, and the vast majority, 65.7% (529,650) were our second highest category. That was over half a million very unwell patients our front line colleagues attended last year.
The national standard for responding to the sickest patients is an average of 7 minutes and we aim to attend to 9 out of 10 of them within 15 minutes. All ambulance trusts in England are measured against ambulance quality indicators, including standards on how quickly patients receive a response following their 999 emergency call.
The table (below) provides detail on each of the main response categories along with the national standard, as well as our performance over the year.
In our region we responded to our sickest patient in an average of 9 minutes and 50 seconds, and to 9 out of 10 of them in under 18 minutes and 22 seconds.
