Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the number of patients who travelled for 30 minutes or more in an ambulance to access an accident and emergency department in each of the last 10 years.

No such estimate has been made. This information is not collected centrally.

Clinical consensus is that for patient outcomes and mortality what matters is the time from becoming ill to receiving specialist, life-saving care. That is why we are developing ambulance services that act as mobile assessment and treatment services, and networked urgent and emergency care services, to ensure patients are treated in the facility best equipped to provide whatever care is needed. For some patients requiring specialist care this may be in a hospital that is further away.