Ambulance Services: Standards
(asked on 9th June 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve ambulance response times.
Ambulance trusts receive continuous central monitoring and support from the NHS England and NHS Improvement’s National Ambulance Coordination Centre. An additional £150 million has been allocated in 2022/23 to improve response times through additional call handler recruitment, retention and relieving other funding pressures.
Information on the average response time in England is not collected in the format requested. Ambulance response times are measured by category at regional ambulance trust level since the introduction of the current national response time standards in 2017/18. Average ambulance response times were not collected under the previous ‘Category A’ national response time standards. The following table shows the mean average ambulance waiting times in hours, minutes and seconds for Category 1, 2, 3 and 4 incidents in England in each year from 2017/18 to May 2022.
| Category 1 | Category 2 | Category 3 | Category 4 |
2017/18 | 0:08:23 | 0:25:51 | 1:04:36 | 1:30:32 |
2018/19 | 0:07:18 | 0:21:47 | 1:01:46 | 1:25:42 |
2019/20 | 0:07:18 | 0:23:50 | 1:11:04 | 1:26:09 |
2020/21 | 0:07:03 | 0:20:57 | 0:54:41 | 1:22:51 |
2021/22 | 0:08:39 | 0:41:17 | 2:13:40 | 2:49:43 |
April to May 2022 | 0:08:36 | 0:39:58 | 2:09:32 | 2:47:57 |
Source: NHS Ambulance Quality Indicators.