Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what information his Department holds on the number of ambulance response cases in Category 3 and Category 4 incidents that involved patients waiting over 5 hours for an ambulance for each region of the UK.

NHS England publishes monthly data on ambulance response times for England as part of the Ambulance Quality Indicators publication. The publication can be found at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ambulance-quality-indicators/

NHS England does not publish performance response time data that allows for an assessment of the number of patients who wait over five hours. It does publish the 90th centile performance, the threshold that the 10% of incidents with the highest response time are greater than.

Ambulance response times for Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are published by their own health services respectively and can be found online. The response time categories and thresholds differ from those used in England, and as such direct comparisons cannot be made. The separate publications for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are available, respectively, at the following three links:

https://www.scottishambulance.com/our-board/board-papers/

https://jcc.nhs.wales/insighthub/asi/

https://www.health-ni.gov.uk/articles/emergency-care-and-ambulance-statistics