Ambulance Services: Standards
(asked on 26th April 2024) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to reduce ambulance response times.
Our Delivery plan for recovering urgent and emergency care services sets out the range of measures being taken to achieve our ambition of reducing average Category 2 ambulance response times to 30 minutes, across 2024/25. Further information on the delivery plan is available at the following link:
Ambulance trusts received £200 million of additional funding in 2023/24 to increase deployed hours and reduce response times. We will maintain the improved ambulance service capacity from this additional funding in 2024/25, alongside the additional 5,000 permanent hospital beds delivered last year to improve patient flow through accident and emergency, and reduce ambulance capacity lost due to handover delays.
There have been significant improvements in performance across the country, with average Category 2 ambulance response times in 2023/24 over 13 minutes faster compared to the previous year, a reduction of over 27%.