Ambulance Services: West Midlands
(asked on 3rd May 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 are taking to reduce ambulance waiting times in (a) the West Midlands and (b) Birmingham, Erdington constituency.
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, including in the West Midlands and Birmingham. 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 this additional capacity this year, alongside the 5,000 additional permanent hospital beds delivered last year to improve patient flow through hospitals, and reduce ambulance capacity lost to ambulance patient handover delays.
Since we published our plan, there have been significant improvements in ambulance response times, including in the West Midlands. In 2023/24, average Category 2 ambulance response times in the West Midlands were over twelve minutes faster compared to the previous year, a reduction of 25%.