In today’s Daily Record by Paul Hutcheon:
In his Daily Record column, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said: “Over the last six years, the number of ambulances with a turnaround time of more than one hour increased by more than 600 per cent – meaning more people suffering dangerously long waits for urgent care. “We will cut ambulance waits and introduce new targets to tackle long turnaround times.”
Direct comparisons with England are not straightforward but in January 2024, BBC UK made it possible:
Via the BBC’s How long do patients wait for an ambulance? app, we can confirm that the average waiting time for a Scottish ambulance was 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. BBC Scotland has since managed to get them removed.
They 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
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Now why would the state broadcaster remove an information App? You’re all probably ahead of me on this.
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Mr Sarwar, must think wur heids button up the back an we huvnae goat an OGrade Arithmetic.
If a wee number, like 2, increases to 14, that is an increase of 12 which is 600% of 2.
Since the average waiting time for a Scottish ambulance is just under 9 minutes, this implies that very few ambulances are taking more than an hour to arrive. So, it will undoubtedly be a wee number compared to the total number of ambulances being called out. So, an increase in the number of ambulances taking more than an hour – even a 600% increase – is not going to increase the overall average by vey much.
Since much of Scotland’s population lives in urban areas in the Central Belt and up the east coast, most are pretty close to A&E units. But, for the small proportion of the population who live in the sparsely populated areas call out times for ambulances to attend a patient in these areas will almost certainly take longer, even with ambulances located in places dotted around the sparsely populated areas. Such ambulances would not be used very often because sparsely populated places do not have all that many accidents because they have so few people. Such ambulances will not be used very often, so Mr Sarwar can claim that ‘this amounts to a waste of scarce resources.’
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What the Scottish Ambulance Service is achieving and what its Welsh peer is achieving with the ‘benefit’ of a Labour government in Cardiff.
Scottish Ambulance Service (April 29) – Unscheduled Care Operational Statistics – Unscheduled Care Incidents between 30 March 2026 to 26 April 2026
In the past week, the median and 90th percentile response times (- the point at which 90% of responses were quicker and 10% were slower) were:
‘Purple incidents – Median: 6 minutes 22 seconds; 90th Percentile: 15 minutes 59 seconds‘
‘Red incidents – Median: 8 minutes 58 seconds; 90th Percentile: 19 minutes 43 seconds.
Welsh Government (April 23): NHS activity and performance summary: February and March 2026 – Report summarising data on activity and performance in the Welsh NHS for February and March 2026.
‘The median response time for purple calls was 7 minutes 37 seconds, longer than in February. The 90th percentile .. was 16 minutes 57 seconds, longer than in February. The response time targets for purple calls were met.’
‘For red calls, the median increased to 9 minutes 25 seconds and the 90th percentile also increased to 22 minutes 23 seconds. This means the response time targets for red calls were not met.’
Just a snapshot comparison but indicative: Scotland’s service performed a bit better. As with much of NHS performance, there is ZERO sense that the British Labour Party, governing with just devolved powers for decades in Cardiff, has the means, the solutions to significantly improve the performance of the NHS in Wales. And given this, why should we believe Labour in Scotland? Indeed, (even) Labour in government in Westminster – with relatively UNLIMITED powers – has clearly been struggling to make substantial improvements to NHS England’s performance.
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