One key factor (and which, surprisingly nobody seems to have mentioned so far) has nothing to do with the quality of ambulance services per se. It's the time that ambulances have to wait to offload patients into over-stretched A&E departments. No ambulance service will be able to meet its response time targets if all of its ambulances are lined up at hospitals, waiting to become free after their previous call-outs.
Quote:
"There are different factors behind the long waiting times.
The ambulance service is seeing record levels of demand this year, as Covid restrictions have been lifted.
More than 860,000 calls to 999 were answered in England in April, 20% higher than in the same month in 2019.
There is a national shortage of paramedics across the UK, and Covid has still been causing disruption - with higher levels of staff sickness over the winter.
Crucially though, ambulance crews themselves have faced long delays when they pick up patients and then try to deliver them to hospital staff in a busy emergency department.
In the first week of April, around one in ten patients had to wait more than an hour for their ambulance to be unloaded in England, far higher than the same week last year, and well above the 15-minute NHS target.
Another paramedic told the BBC that those kinds of waits were having a 'dangerous impact' on patient safety.
"We are doing the job to provide emergency care and to save lives, but actually now we are just an extended ward of the hospital," he said.
"I'm meant to care for a patient who had been in the back of my ambulance for 14 hours, but nobody has ever really taught me how to look after someone like that." "
Source:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-61335711