Change to ambulance targets?

According to a BBC report yesterday, target times for ambulances to reach some seriously ill patients could be lengthened.

A leaked NHS document included plans to change the response time for some Red 2 patients – those with "serious but not the most life-threatening" conditions – from eight to 19 minutes in England.

It said the plans had been backed by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, subject to approval by ambulance trust bosses. The government said no decisions had been made.

Audlem already operates with a 19-minute target as local campaigners accepted years ago that an 8-minute target was unrealistic given Audlem's distance from local towns.

AudlemOnline campaigned over a number of years from 2006 to improve North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) response times to emergency calls in the district.

After a series of very poor responses to emergency calls – sometimes well over an hour and with ambulances found to be travelling very long distances to get here – the website, working with parish councillor Mike Hill, held a long series of meetings with NWAS's chief executive, local MPs Stephen O'Brien and Edward Timpson, and representatives of Nantwich Town Council.

It took some years, but eventually NWAS accepted an Audlem proposal that an ambulance should be based in Nantwich rather than at Leighton Hospital. This dramatically improved response times in Nantwich and Audlem.

Since then, AudlemOnline has received few complaints about over-lengthy delays following emergency calls, in marked contrast to the period before the ambulance was based in Nantwich itself.

The meetings with NWAS also led to the setting up of the successful Audlem First Responder team in 2008.

As yet, the proposal to lengthen target times for some patients has not been implemented, but it's one to keep an eye on locally.

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