Ambulance Queues: Health Outcomes

Lord Flight Excerpts

Thursday 13th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

I am sure the noble Baroness will acknowledge that a number of people have been calling for ways to address this. The Government announced the Urgent and Emergency Care Recovery 10 Point Action Plan last year, which includes supporting 999 and 111 services, looking at primary care and community health services, greater use of urgent treatment centres, increased support for children and young people, better communications and call handling, improving inflow and hospital discharge, looking at mental health needs and a number of other issues. In each of those 10 points we have drilled down on working with trusts and the ambulance service to make sure we can address the issues that are currently being raised.

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, could the Government look at how many lives have been lost as a result of delays? I suggest this might be more of an issue than the Government are aware of.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

We regularly talk to the NHS—every day, in fact. We have, for example, daily omicron calls. Looking at some of the data, over 925,000 calls to 999 were answered by the ambulance service in December 2021, which is nearly 30,000 calls a day. That is 2% more than in November 2021, 22% more than in November 2020 and 9% more than in December 2019. We have invested in more people in the call rooms, working with BT to better handle the calls, and ensuring we have more staff where we need them to handle the whole system and ensure we can respond quicker.