Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to section 4.2 of NHS key statistics: England, HC 07281, published on 25 October 2024, (a) what assessment he has made of the causes of the increase in life threatening ambulance calls since Spring 2021 and (b) what percentage of the calls each month were cardiac related.

The rise in category 1 incidents reflects an increase in the proportion of patients’ ambulance services that have been determined to require an immediate face-to-face response. This may reflect a long-term trend of rising pressures on the health services from an increasing aging population, and complexity that comes with more patients with multiple comorbidities. Information on increases in ambulance service demand is published by NHS England. The total number of cardiac arrests that ambulance services responded to is published by month, however this information does not include other cardiac incidents, for example heart attack or angina, and the information is not disaggregated by incident category. The following table shows the total number of cardiac arrests each month from March 2021 to June 2024:

Source: The data is published by NHS England, and is available at the following link: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ambulance-quality-indicators/