THE TIME it takes the national ambulance service to respond to emergency calls is getting longer, new figures reveal.
The figures, compiled by the HSE on the performance of its own ambulance service, show that while 16,036 emergency calls were responded to within eight minutes in the first three months of last year, the number of emergency calls responded to within the same timeframe in the first three months of this year dropped to 14,331.
Likewise, the number of calls responded to within 14 minutes fell from 31,984 to 29,801 over the same period; those responded to within 19 minutes fell from 39,704 to 36,191; and the number responded to within 26 minutes fell from 45,265 in the first quarter of last year to 41,501 in the first quarter of this year.
While there was an overall drop of 2,338 to 50,080 in the number of emergency calls made to the national ambulance service during the first quarter of this year, this in itself does not explain the longer response times, which refer to the time it takes for an ambulance to arrive at the scene of an incident from when the request for the ambulance is logged.
Asked to explain the longer response times, the HSE said one of the reasons was because there had been an increase in the number of emergency calls from rural areas which take longer to attend to because of the distances which have to be covered.
In a statement it said: “The figures for year to date regarding ambulance performance activity show that there has been a small drop in response time targets across the pre-determined time bands due to two main factors.”
The first factor was that “the national ambulance service recorded an increase in the number of emergency calls from rural areas which have wider mileage to cover/longer journey time” and the second was down to the fact that there had been a significant increase in the volume of non-urgent calls made to the service, up from 46,716 to 68,551 in the first three months of this year.
The figures, which were presented to a recent meeting of the HSE board, do not give a breakdown of the response times for ambulances in different regions of the country.
Nonetheless, Fine Gael’s health spokesman, Dr James Reilly, said the figures and the HSE’s own statement confirmed the fears of people in rural areas that a faster ambulance service would not be put in place to compensate for their reduced AE services.
“Rather than beefing up the ambulance service to compensate for their local AE service, the ambulance service has in fact deteriorated, which obviously further underlines the unwise decision by the Minister to rush ahead with her plans for the closure of these units before putting in place the necessary improvements at regional level that were promised by her and recommended by Teamwork in its reports,” he added.
There was also the nonsensical situation where ambulances were regularly held up at AE units in Dublin, Dr Reilly said,because there were no trolleys vacant to transfer their patients due to AE overcrowding.
Meanwhile, the HSE said it was conducting a national spatial analysis in conjunction with the Pre Hospital Emergency Care Council so as to be in a position to have emergency resources on standby at peak periods identified during the analysis. It also said it was in the process of separating emergency and non-emergency activity which would free up resources for emergencies.
Earlier this month there was controversy after it took at least 37 minutes for an ambulance to arrive at a hotel in Co Monaghan when a man collapsed of a suspected heart attack. He was dead by the time emergency services arrived. The HSE said at the time there were two ambulances on duty in the county but, as both were engaged, a third ambulance from Dundalk, which was in Castleblaney at the time, was directed to the hotel in Knockatallon.