Ambulance response times in England
April 2023 is ... better
Category 2 ambulance calls in England are properly urgent. They are the category you are put in if you call 999 and the dispatcher suspects a stroke (slurring of speech, drooping face, limbs not working) or a heart attack (intense disabling chest pain).
The target for NHS ambulance trusts is to get a paramedic to you within a mean of eighteen minutes (shown as a red dashed line in the charts below). And, cutting a very long and very sad story short: let’s just say they have not been anywhere near there for a while.
April 2023’s figure, reported today, is a mean 28 minutes, which - despite being well over target - is enormously better than we’ve seen for months. Thankfully, the small spike up in March now looks like exactly that, and not the start of a broader drift back to the deadly levels we accepted in 2021 and 2022.
These mean times of course conceal much variation, both by time and by location, so 90th percentile times are perhaps more diagnostic of performance that patients will see on tough days. That is, the time that one in ten patients will wait that month, or longer. This 90th percentile target is 40 minutes for Category 2s.
For England, the April 90th percentile time is pretty much dead on 1 hour. Again, this cannot be called good, but it’s an absolute a world away from December 2022 when it hit 3 hours 41 mins. (To spell this out - because the sheer magnitude of this disaster is hard to believe - this means that 1 in 10 people across England calling for an emergency such as a stroke or heart attack, waited longer than 3 hours and 41 minutes for an ambulance to arrive).
Even more encouraging in terms of its recent improvement is the reduced dispersion. The very worst performer (consistently the South West region) is also showing the greatest recent improvement, down to a 35 minute mean in April, and a 1 hour 11 minute 90th percentile time. These times may not sound wonderful (and they aren’t - they have the same targets as everyone else), but they also have to be seen in context of the disaster just five months ago: a scarcely believable Category 2 mean response time of 2 hours 39 minutes, and 90th percentile time of 6 hours 39 minutes (this is not a typo, it is the correct figure).