Concern over poor ambulance response times in Chichester district

Poor ambulance response times for top-priority calls in some rural areas of the Chichester district was highlighted at a meeting of county health watchdogs.

The number one priority for ambulances is category A calls – defined as ‘immediately life-threatening.’

County councillor James Walsh told the health overview and scrutiny committee he was concerned targets for the first call-out to these cases were being missed in rural parts of the district.

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There was significant under-achievement in the Chichester and Mid Sussex districts and particularly significant under-achievement in the Horsham area – 64 per cent.

“But it gets worse,” said Cllr Walsh, a retired GP.

The response time in the centre of Chichester, Horsham itself, and the towns in Mid Sussex was significantly better, and brought the overall response time for the three districts up to the average.

“The worst performance is in outlying towns like Petworth, and several other towns and villages are even worse, bringing us to the heart of rural issues,” he declared.

Cllr Walsh added: “I wouldn’t want to be an old person with a life-threatening illness living in a rural village with this sort of response times.”

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He knew the ambulance service was talking about things like stationing vehicles out near where the demands were predicted.

But it was still a long way off delivering improvements.

Cllr Walsh said he knew the East Anglian ambulance service had tested the idea of diverting routine patient transport away from the ambulance service to other providers, so it could achieve the delivery of life-threatening cases to hospital.

He wondered whether this had been considered in West Sussex.

Andy Cashman, assistant director of business development for the South East Coast Ambulance Service, acknowledged standards were not being met in some areas. “But we are working very hard to do this,” he told the HOSC.

The service was committed to patient transport services.

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There was a real blur between these and A&E services. “I would not want to divest ourselves of these because we would be losing a resource,” he added.

Jeremy Leggett, chief executive of Action in Rural Sussex, said there was no sense in looking at statistics on a district basis – they had to come down to a smaller level of detail in rural areas.

Ambulance response times were ‘surprisingly poor’ in some of the county’s rural areas.

But Chichester district councillor Brian Weekes, who lives in the northern part of the district, said his personal experience was quite the opposite.

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He and his wife were sitting at home when their daughter’s baby started to arrive – as a farmer, he was used to delivering babies with four legs, but not ones with two legs.

“I called 999, and within two or three minutes the ambulance was outside the door – how they did it I don’t know,” he said.