Ambulance Services
(asked on 15th October 2021) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what guidance his Department has issued to Ambulance Services on prioritising call outs; and on what basis the priority of call outs is determined.
The Department has issued no such guidance. The prioritisation of responses to 999 calls is an operational matter for National Health Service ambulance services. The following table shows the ambulance service’s categories for evaluating 999 incidents, with corresponding response time standards.
Category | Headline description | Sub description | Mean response time standard | 90th percentile response time standard |
1 | Life Threatening | A time critical life-threatening event requiring immediate intervention or resuscitation. | 7 minutes | 15 minutes |
2 | Emergency | Potentially serious conditions that may require rapid assessment and urgent on-scene intervention and/or urgent transport. | 18 minutes | 40 minutes |
3 | Urgent | An urgent problem (not immediately life threatening) that needs treatment to relieve suffering and transport or assessment and management at the scene with referral where needed within a clinically appropriate timeframe. | None | 2 hours |
4 | Less-Urgent | Problems that are less urgent but require assessment and possibly transport within a clinically appropriate timeframe. | None | 3 hours |