Almost one-third of calls to the ambulance service in three health board areas are not responded to within the standard 20 minutes. Eithne Donnellan, Health Correspondent, reports.
The health board regions where response times are greater in 30 per cent of instances are the west, north-west and south-east.
The figures are significant in the context of the proposals in the Hanly report to remove full emergency services from a number of local hospitals, which would make patients more dependent on the ambulance service to take them further distances to larger hospitals.
However, the report has proposed the ambulance service be upgraded before full A&E services are withdrawn from smaller hospitals.
Latest figures for ambulance response times show they have improved or remained stable in all regions since 2000. In the Eastern Regional Health Authority area, where distances to patients would normally be shorter, 97 per cent of emergency calls are responded to within 20 minutes. The equivalent figures for other health board regions are: the midlands 80 per cent, north-east 88 per cent, north-west 70 per cent, south-east 70.5 per cent, the south 85 per cent and the west 68 per cent. Figures were not available for the mid-west yesterday.
A spokeswoman for the Western Health Board said over 43 per cent of emergencies were more than 15 miles from an ambulance base which, combined with the region's large rural area and poor road network, made it difficult to improve response times. However the board has established a number of community-based emergency medical response teams to try to bring early medical intervention to sites furthest from ambulance stations.
In the north-west, the health board plans to buy four-wheel drive vehicles to ferry emergency medical technicians to the site of accidents and other emergencies in remote areas. The move, unveiled at a board meeting this week, is in an attempt to target so-called "blackspot" areas where the time taken for ambulances to respond to emergency calls is more than 20 minutes.
The board's chief ambulance officer, Mr Frank McClintock, said the key issue was to get clinical care, rather than ambulances, to patients as quickly as possible.Therefore the most appropriate solution was to have a number of rapid-response vehicles, rather than extra ambulances.
Staff in the rapid response-vehicles will rush to attend to calls and make patients comfortable until an ambulance arrives. They will also provide cover if an ambulance in one area is out when another call arrives.