Further thoughts on the Ambulance meeting

Since Audlem Online published its report yesterday on Thursday night's meeting with the North West Ambulance Service and MP Stephen O'Brien, a number of comments have been received.

One person at the meeting has suggested everyone is advised to use a land line telephone rather than a mobile when calling the emergency services, if there is a choice. Bob Williams, Deputy Chief Executive of NWAS, confirmed that calling on a land line automatically registered the address on their communications system and, with the help of Satnav, the ambulance should find the address more easily. This doesn't happen with a mobile phone.

Other people have suggested that the Parish Council presses for the printouts of emergency callout times to Audlem. There was some surprise at the figures quoted in our report (which were checked with Bob Williams) that the NWAS aimed to reduce average emergency callout times from 16 minutes to 12 minutes. Given many calls appear to be taking over 45 minutes, and in some cases much longer, there must have been some remarkably quick responses to achieve an average of 16 minutes!

A further issue raised is that callers don't know if the ambulance service has classified their call as an emergency or not – this means they don't know if the ambulance is aiming for an 8 minute or a 60 minute response. It also makes it near impossible for anyone to check how well the service is performing as calls that were thought to be real emergencies could have been classified as less urgent by the NWAS, this making the targets more achievable.

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