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Professor John Robertson OBA

In Parliament, yesterday:

First Minister John Swinney has apologised to a young footballer who had to wait five hours for an ambulance after breaking her leg. Brooke Paterson, 19, was injured while playing for Linlithgow Rose away at Cumbernauld United in North Lanarkshire on Sunday.

After the case was raised by Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar at First Minister’s Questions, Swinney said that it appeared the ambulance call had been misclassified, meaning it did not have “the priority it should have had”.

“That is not acceptable,” he said.

“That is an error that has been made and we have to look into whether that is the case and whether there are other steps that need to be taken to remedy that.”

Sarwar accused Swinney of having “broken the system” and said families across the country were suffering as a result of waits for accident and emergency treatment.

I get why they find it easier to just apologise and avoid further sensationalised media coverage but the public deserves to hear the actual news on Sarwar’s supposedly ‘broken system’.

Here it is:

There are some minor problems in comparing the data for England and Scotland but you can be sure that were they to favour the former, they’d be widely reported. Here’s why they’re not:

Sources:

https://www.scottishambulance.com/

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/ambulance-quality-indicators/

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/

I see there’s a Labour councillor Paterson in the area – auntie?

Footnote:

Comparing median and mean ambulance response times can be useful, but each metric provides different insights, and their comparability depends on the data’s distribution and context. Here’s a breakdown:

• Mean (Average) Response Time: The sum of all response times divided by the number of responses. It gives a general sense of typical performance but is sensitive to extreme values (e.g., a few very long response times can skew the mean upward).
• Median Response Time: The middle value when all response times are ordered. It represents the point where half the responses are faster and half are slower, making it less affected by outliers and often a better measure of “typical” performance in skewed datasets.