Ambulance Services: Suffolk
(asked on 14th 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 is taking to reduce ambulance waiting times in (a) Suffolk and (b) Suffolk Coastal 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 Suffolk. A summary of the progress made, and actions taken in 2024/25 is set out in Urgent and emergency care recovery plan year 2: building on learning from 2023/24, which is available at the following link:
Nationally, ambulance trusts received £200 million of additional funding in 2023/24 to increase deployed hours and reduce response times, and this service capacity is being maintained in 2024/25. This is alongside the delivery of new ambulances, and action to reduce handover delays. With more ambulances on the roads, patients will receive the treatment they need more swiftly.
Since we published our plan, there has been significant improvement in ambulance response times, including in Suffolk. In 2023/24, average Category 2 ambulance response time in the East of England was over 23 minutes faster compared to the previous year, a reduction of over 34%.