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 increase the use of call-before-you-convey by ambulance services and hospital trusts.

In the Urgent and Emergency Care Plan 2025/2026, ambulance services have been focusing on delivering a range of practical actions to improve performance in 2025/26, including;

• improving ambulance ‘hear and treat’ service rates with increasing the proportion of Category 2 ambulance incidents where an ambulance clinician provides advice and treatment over the phone; and
• reducing avoidable ambulance dispatches and conveyances by ensuring all Category 3 and 4 calls are clinically navigated, validated, and where appropriate, triaged in ambulance control centres, or in single points of access.

All ambulance services have implemented call before you convey arrangements, to ensure crews can access senior clinical advice on scene and convey patients to an emergency department only where it is clinically appropriate.

We are also expanding access to urgent community care services to support the reduction of unnecessary emergency department attendances and hospital admissions.