Ambulance service hits call-out targets after being worst in the country last year
THE ambulance service operating in the Bristol area has achieved national targets for reaching the sickest patients for the first time in four years.
Great Western Ambulance Service (GWAS) has turned around its performance in the last year and is now reaching life-threatening patients within eight minutes 75 per cent of the time, as required by the NHS.
The service, which operates in Gloucestershire Wiltshire and the former Avon area, had struggled to meet national standards since it was formed from separate organisations in 2006.
But figures published by the NHS Information Centre this week show that in 2009-10 they finally achieved the targets. Last year GWAS was the worst ambulance service in the country for reaching patients classified as category A, getting to 68.4 per cent of life-threatening patients in the required time.
Of the 12 ambulance services in England, five failed to meet the standard during the last financial year.
New chief executive David Whiting joined GWAS at the start of 2009-10 and has helped steer the trust to better fortunes.
The service is still failing to hit the target of reaching 95 per cent of serious cases that are not life-threatening within 19 minutes, but has seen an improvement in performance, making it to 90.7 per cent. In 2008-09, the service reached 87.2 per cent of the category B calls within the target time.
GWAS is one of the smaller ambulance services in England but, as with the other trusts, has seen an increase in the number of emergency 999 calls being made every year.
In 2009-10, almost 300,000 emergency calls were made to GWAS out of the 7.8million throughout England.
Mr Whiting said: "How quickly we reach our patients is clearly a significant part of the service we are here to provide. The fact that GWAS has met these important national performance standards – despite responding to ten per cent more 999 calls than the previous year – is a sure sign of the progress the trust continued to make last year. Meeting these performance standards for the first time, while not an end in itself, is an important message to everyone in the region that we are determined to provide the best patient care possible as quickly as possible."
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