Yorkshire Ambulance Service has the worst record in England for its response to life-threatening emergencies, a new report reveals.

The NHS Information Centre yesterday published a detailed report into the performance of all ambulance trusts in England for 2009/10.

It shows the service managed to reach 70.8 per cent of category A (life-threatening) calls within eight minutes in 2009/2010, falling short of a national target of 75 per cent.

It is an improvement on the previous year when 69.4 per cent of category A calls were reached within eight minutes but it is the poorest performance of all 12 NHS organisations providing ambulance services in England.

Information centre chief executive Tim Straughan said: “The figures give a clear picture of how the ambulance service operated on the ground last year and will help both the service and the NHS plan for the future”.

In April this year YAS chief executive Martyn Pritchard was forced to rebut claims from leaders of the GMB union that the service was failing patients because it did not have enough staff.

Mr Pritchard, who leaves the trust this month, said there had been heavy investment in frontline resources over the past two years, with an additional 280 frontline staff.

The report from the information centre shows YAS responded to 96.7 per cent of category A calls within 19 minutes. The trust undertook more than 1.6 million patient journeys, of which more than 470,000 were emergency journeys.

Simon Worthington, acting chief executive of Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust, said: “The report shows that improvements in performance have been made and year-on-year we are reaching patients more quickly than before. We remain committed to making further improvements. “During 2009-10 the trust reached 75 per cent of patients in Yorkshire with potentially life-threatening illnesses or injuries within eight minutes and 30 seconds.

“By the end of May 2010, our year-to-date performance for category A calls showed that we had improved further and we are responding to 75 per cent of patients within the eight-minute target.

“This comes despite a six per cent increase in demand during the last year which was partly due to the worst winter weather on record for 30 years. Across Yorkshire in 2009-10 we received 710,916 999 urgent and emergency calls, almost 40,000 more than the previous year.

“During the last two years we have invested heavily in frontline resources by recruiting an additional 275 frontline staff, spending over £5.5 million modernising and expanding our fleet and making improvements to our 999 communications centres.

“The benefits of this investment mean that our response times continue to show steady improvement.

“Response times are not the only way we measure the improvements to patient care and at YAS we are proud of the high-quality clinical care we provide.”

Jane Hazelgrave, director of finance at NHS Bradford and Airedale, which is the lead commissioner of ambulance services in Yorkshire and the Humber, said: “We are pleased with the improved performance of Yorkshire Ambulance Service NHS Trust this year and are confident that they will sustain this improvement.

“These improvements need to be sustained and we will continue to work with YAS to monitor this.”

The report can be found at ic.nhs.uk

HOW TARGET TIMES MEASURED

  • The Department of Health’s response times are calculated via a strict process that begins the moment the emergency telephone call is connected to the operations room.
  • That is the first of five procedures that have to take place before the response period ends.
  • Following Call Connect the next step is Call Answer when the call is answered by a “competent and trained call taker”.
  • Stage three is Assign Vehicle.
  • The next procedure is Vehicle Mobile when the ambulance begins responding.
  • Stage four is Arrive Scene.
  • Then begins a series of smaller “response time” processes, including the time it takes between arriving at the scene and leaving for a hospital or other treatment centre, and the time it takes to hand over the patient at the hospital before clearing the ambulance for further emergencies.