Protest march shows strength of feeling about NWAS

There was a large turnout for the protest march in Nantwich yesterday against the NWAS' (North West Ambulance Service) plans to downgrade the First Responder scheme. Residents of Audlem joined the march that snaked through the town from the Barony to Mill Island where the new Nantwich & Crewe MP Edward Timpson and Town Council leader Cllr. Bill McGinnis spoke about how the protests would continue until NWAS saw sense.

Fisrt Responder Gavin Palin also spoke and thanked everyone for their support and received a huge ovation. There is clearly massive sympathy for the First Responders and the valuable work they do. It appears that the NWAS has seriously misread the public's mood by pressing on with changes to the service which will greatly reduce the effectiveness of the volunteers who, given the inefficiency of the NWAS in meeting its ambulance call-out targets, are so often the first on the scene of an accident.

Audlem has been prominent in all the news coverage of the issue. Audlem Councillor Mike Hill is urging NWAS to delay changes until the ambulance response times are on target. He has told NWAS chief executive John Burnside: "We believe, given the extremely poor ambulance response times in this area, there should be no reduction in the First Responder service and training until your ambulances are hitting your own targets of '8 minutes in 95% of emergencies' and '19 minutes in 95% of amber cases'. "To reduce the one part of our local service that seems to work well, the First Responders, without you hitting your ambulance response targets, is putting lives seriously at risk." Mike concluded by saying: "You will be held responsible and we will not let up in publishing any future serious failures."

The NWAS is to come under fire shortly when it faces the Cheshire County Health Scrutiny committee. The ambulance service should have consulted this group before it made changes but is now belatedly to make its case on 16th July. Submissions against the NWAS' plans have been put forward by many town councils as well as by Audlem Parish Council.

Audlem Parish Council is also seeking explanations about the ambulance call-out statistics supplied to them by NWAS. For example, how did a 40 minute wait for one call in Audlem became 32 minutes in NWAS's official statement, yet then became 13.88 minutes in the statistics that NWAS later supplied to Audlem Parish Council? NWAS has tried to clarify the statistics by saying that the 13.88 minutes wasn't after all the 'ambulance response time' but the 'first response' by a local First Responder. When it was pointed out that their official statement had said a First Responder had arrived to this particular incident in 12 minutes, it was explained that the NWAS had made an arithmetical error in their statement about the case.

Not only does this example cast doubt on the service's statistics, it makes the First Responders' role even more vital, not only to the public involved in an accident, but also to NWAS' call-out statistics. If the times they have been providing really do record the 'First Response' rather than the 'Ambulance Response', their performance has been even worse than their statistics have suggested.

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