By Professor John Robertson, OBA

In the Guardian today, the above, and:

A lot of people, like Dave, have had to wait for an ambulance. One patient in Wales waited 46 hours and 46 minutes after a fall. Ambulance response times vary across the UK. In England they rose sharply in September, and emergency care performance is also down, as the NHS heads into a difficult winter. A Guardian investigation found that, in 2022, the year Dave Strachan spent nine hours and 52 minutes waiting for an ambulance, more than 500 patients in England died after a delayed ambulance response. This included people who had been in accidents, and victims of strokes and heart attacks.

In August, the head of the ambulance service in Wales said the number of hours lost because crews were waiting to hand over patients had quadrupled since 2018. Handovers – the time it takes for a patient arriving by ambulance to be handed into the care of A&E staff – are regarded as a key indicator of a system under pressure, according to the Nuffield Trust, as delays occur “as a result of a mismatch between A&E/hospital capacity and the number of elective or emergency patients arriving.”  _{https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/13/nine-hours-52-minutes-did-dave-strachan-ambulance-wait-cost-him-his-life}

Scotland? No mention in the Guardian report.

Wonder why? Here’s why:

In January 2024, I wrote:

Via the BBC’s How long do patients wait for an ambulance? app today, we can confirm that the average waiting time for a Scottish ambulance is 8 min and 46 secs: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59549800

Also, from BBC UK on 14 December 2023:

Average response times of more than 38 minutes for category two emergency calls such as heart attacks and strokes – above the target time of 18 minuteshttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67714151

Yes, I know the English figures are only for Category 2 emergency calls such as heart attacks and strokes and we can’t see if the Scottish figures are for the same or for all categories, but if they were for all categories including the less serious ones, that would make the Scottish average even more impressive!

I did expect not to find Scottish postcodes in the app, as is the case for Wales and Northern Ireland. Let’s see if BBC Scotland manage to get them removed after they see this.

The seem to have stopped offering this service in early March 2024 when the Scottish average wait for an ambulance was 8 minutes and 36 seconds but for England, they stopped posting the average to replace it with the percentage waiting more than 30 minutes – 27%.

_{https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59549800}