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 reduce ambulance response times in a) Newcastle-under-Lyme and b) Staffordshire.

A range of actions to improve ambulance response times are being taken forward in collaboration between the East Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Trust and the Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent Integrated Care Board, including;

• Getting It Right First Time improvement support programme identifying improvement opportunities within the acute trusts;

• pre-hospital system partnership working to develop the ‘single point of access’ model which provides advice and guidance to direct patients to alternative community pathways, helping to avoid hospital admission and reduce ambulance demand; and

• continued work to improve hospital handovers to support ambulances back onto the roads.