Professor John Robertson OBA

BBC Scotland yesterday had:

A great-grandfather who broke his leg in a fall spent seven hours lying on the floor of a garden centre while waiting for an ambulance. James Craig, 87, was waiting so long for emergency help that the nursery in North Lanarkshire had to stay open well past its 17:00 closing time.

His granddaughter Mariann Whitson said she had lost faith in the ambulance service as a result of their experience. The Scottish Ambulance Service has apologised to Mr Craig and said it was under “significant pressure” on the day he fell.

Mr Craig, from Coatbridge, spent several weeks in hospital after the incident and had to have a hip replacement, but he is now at home recovering. The incident comes after several years of ambulance waiting times increasing throughout Scotland.

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/

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.