Shadow Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, has today written to the Health Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, to demand urgent action on ambulance response times. Figures from NHS England reveal a significant deterioration in 999 response times across England over the last two years. In eight out of 10 regions in England, ambulances are taking longer to reach the most serious Category A calls. These include patients suffering strokes or cardiac arrest where the speed of an ambulance arriving often makes the difference between life and death.
Patients in the East of England now wait two minutes longer for an ambulance to respond to a Category A call, whilst patients in the North East and the West Midlands wait 36 seconds longer. These figure represent an average across thousands of calls - the figures show that in some cases seriously ill patients will have waited in excess of 30 minutes for an ambulance. Labour has called on Jeremy Hunt to provide an explanation and urgent action to halt the slump in standards.
Andy Burnham MP said: "These alarming new figures raise real concerns that lives are being put at risk by the increasing chaos in the NHS. Too many ambulances are trapped in queues at over-stretched A&Es, unable to hand over patients. This, in turn, is seeing a worrying deterioration in ambulance response times across many regions of the country. It explains why many people who are calling 999, particularly in rural areas, are facing longer, agonising waits for help to arrive."
Continuing Mr Burnham commented: "In life-threatening situations, every single second counts and that is why this slump in standards simply cannot go on. Urgent action is needed from the Government to turn things around. Slower 999 response is yet another sign of an NHS heading in the wrong direction under this Government. Their failure to get a grip on the A&E crisis is now having a knock-on effect of the safety of our ambulance services. It is more proof that David Cameron simply can't be trusted with the NHS."
