The North West Ambulance Service is putting extra resources into Cheshire to improve response times for patients whose lives are in danger.
The service is meant to respond to life-threatening calls within eight minutes on 75% of occasions but has failed over the past few months.
Ambulance Trust spokesperson Emily Dalton said: “We recognise that recently, Cheshire, Warrington and Wirral as a region, didn’t meet the Government performance target.
“The trust is committed to providing the highest levels of patient care and has undertaken various initiatives in the Cheshire area to continue to improve performance such as; utilising alternative care pathways within the community, developing Community First Responder teams and the staff responder scheme.
“As well as this, the trust is in the process of recruiting frontline emergency staff with a view to placing two rapid response vehicles and three ambulances in Cheshire in the next three months.
Also this financial year, the Urgent Care Desk in Merseyside, which covers the Cheshire area, is due to be expanded.
“Collectively, these additional resources and initiatives will assist in driving an improvement in performance and ultimately improve the care we give to our patients.
“NWAS is commissioned to deliver performance for the region as a whole, rather than targets for individual areas. In terms of delivering its national targets for last year, NWAS was the joint top performer nationally for 2012/13.”
On April 1, 2013, the national performance targets changed so that the service must respond to the most serious life-threatening calls (Red One) within eight minutes of connection on 75% of occasions. In April, the service was only able to achieve a 73.7% performance for Cheshire.
However, very serious calls (Red Two) in the county were responded to within eight minutes, following triage, on 75.6% of occasions – exceeding the 75% target. Less serious (A19) calls were responded to within the target of 19 minutes on 96.5% of occasions – exceeding the 95% target.
