Ambulance Response Times

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Wednesday 1st December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems clear that the problem is a symptom of system pressures and will require a whole-system approach to resolve it once and for all—Covid, social care packages to help with discharges and local factors, and the fragility of the NHS infrastructure going in to the pandemic. The Minister has explained some of the short-term emergency plans literally to save lives, but in the absence of an NHS workforce strategy, how will the Government produce a system-wide resolution of this matter?

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a very important point: we should be looking at this in a systemic way. In fact, I did my PhD in a department of system science, where you look at problems in a holistic way—rather than analysing individual problems, you look at the whole system. We found odd unintended consequences. For example, a friend forgot his inhaler, could not get one from the chemist, could not get one from the A&E and, in the end, had to call out an ambulance. There are a number of times when ambulances are called out needlessly, and that is on top of the pressures we are already facing due to Covid. We are tackling the backlog, which, hopefully, will also reduce ambulance waiting times.