Ambulance Service Declines

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Thu 9th Sep 2004

Cllr David Ward today revealed that figures slipped out in June in a government statistical bulletin show that the performance of the West Yorkshire Ambulance Trust has deteriorated. Cllr Ward said:

"The ambulance service received 248,000 emergency calls in 2003-04 an increase of nearly 6% over the previous year. Unfortunately, the number of the emergency, life threatening calls which they reached in 8 minutes has been dropping and last year they achieved this in only 68% of cases. This is 9% down on 2001-02 and takes West Yorkshire to the bottom of the league of urban services. The national target is 75%. Across England, response times to these calls is up 5% over the same period to 75.7%.

"The service is also required to respond to 95% of non-life-threatening incidents within 14 minutes but once again their performance has dropped from 93.1% to 86.2% since 2001-02.

I don't want to knock the ambulance staff. Much of the time they do a good job sometimes under very difficult circumstances. Demand for their services is rising and they have to deal with hoax and frivolous calls. However, something is clearly going wrong when response times are falling and when services in other urban areas are better.

"I have written to Ralph Berry, Chairman of the Trust Board asking him what the Board intends to do to improve its performance."