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Peter Black and South Wales West Liberal DemocratsRepresenting Aberavon, Bridgend, Gower, Neath, Ogmore, Port Talbot, and Swansea |
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More work to be done on ambulance services
March 11, 2010 12:00 AM
By Peter Black in Western Mail
By Peter Black in Western Mail
The recent resignation of the head of the Welsh Ambulance Service cannot be divorced from the long term problems that the service has faced. The service has failed to adequately deal with lengthy response times for many years and the financial situation remains precarious.
This is not something that I blame the outgoing Chief Executive for. When Alan Murray took up post, he inherited an Ambulance Trust that was lurching from crisis to crisis and performing badly. He brought stability and leadership to the organisation and worked hard to improve its performance. That the Ambulance Trust is doing much better is down to his efforts.
But the picture is far from rosy. In some parts of Wales ambulance response times are still woeful. In Monmouthshire during January only 42% of emergency ambulance calls were responded to within the eight minute target.
And statistics released to the Welsh Liberal Democrats last week found that during 2009, over 9,000 people with an emergency need had to wait longer than twenty minutes for an ambulance.
The eight minute target for an ambulance to reach a category A emergency is based on clinical requirements. These targets have not been created in order to measure performance, but are based upon research into the time it takes for brain cells to die when someone is in cardiac arrest.
Every minute counts when somebody is suffering heart attack, and at the moment, far too many are waiting those crucial extra minutes which could put their lives at risk.
One of the factors behind the failure to meet targets consistently across Wales is the financial situation that the service has found itself in. It is still dogged by it's historic debt and a recent independent report found that it is underfunded to the tune of £5 million per year. Delays in off-loading patients at A&E departments cost a further £2 million per year.
This is no small change and the financial struggle will have a big impact on what the Ambulance Trust are able to achieve.
Financial and managerial stability is the key to the successful performance of any organisation, whether it is in the public or private sector. The Welsh Ambulance Service has suffered from a lack of both. The Minister's treatment of the service has hardly helped matters, threatening it with £40 million of efficiency savings before being forced into a partial u-turn and refusing to write-off debt, even though she has done so for most NHS Trusts.
If the Welsh Assembly Government is serious about helping the service to improve then the Health Minister must give 100% backing to whoever is appointed as the new Chief Executive.
The most practical form that this backing can take will be the writing off of the service's debt and provision of the extra investment identified by the independent review so that the service can function adequately. She also needs to sort out the delays at Accident and Emergency Services and the shortage of acute beds that are having such a drastic impact on ambulance response times.
If she fails to do this, then whoever succeeds Alan Murray as Chief Executive of the Ambulance Trust will be put in the situation whereby they will be doing the job with one hand tied behind their back. That would be unacceptable.
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