The Isle of Wight Ambulance Service, on average, takes over 12 minutes to reach the most life-threatening emergencies across the Island – some 2-and-a-half minutes longer than the national average.
Official figures for July reveal that Category 1 emergencies, such as cardiac arrests, have a mean response time of 12:09 on the Island vs 09:35 for England as a whole. It takes 13:34 for a transporting vehicle (i.e. an ambulance) to arrive on scene. This is below the target response time of 7 minutes.
For Category 2 calls, which are still serious but are not immediately life-threatening, the Isle of Wight Ambulance Service takes on average 30 minutes to respond, which is much better than the national average of 59:07.
It is a positive picture for Category 3 calls too, with it taking 1 hour 17 minutes for a response vs the national average of a staggering 3 hours and 17 minutes. The same can be said for Category 4 calls; 1 hour 18 minutes vs 4 hours 2 minutes.
Last month, the Isle of Wight Ambulance Service responded to 2,463 incidents of which 1,585 led to a conveyance to A&E or elsewhere. It means that 878 face-to-face responses did not lead to the patient being taken to hospital.
The Isle of Wight NHS Trust says it is still investing in the ambulance service, with recruitment underway for a variety of roles alongside an extension to the ambulance station at Dodnor Lane.
And yet they still get nominated for awards
Don’t blame the ambulance service It’s the selfish and inconsiderate Joe and Josephine Public. To give an example, the woman over the road from me called and got an ambulance for a sprained wrist. You can be punished for wasting Police time, why not the same for the emergency, life or death, ambulance service.
My only experience of late, thank goodness is watching 999 programmes where the ambulance crews seem to do everything short of knocking potential patients out to get them to hospital, we decided the other night to count the incidents against the need for hospital treatment based on nothing more than common logic, out of twelve incidents, three were social care situations, two were minor injuries that you would be hard pushed to see your doctor with,and one was a broken finger, eleven were convinced to go to hospital and you do wonder the reasoning behind it.
Our society is becoming more and more litigious. Not erring on the side of caution risks your job, a grilling in a coroner’s court and having your name smeared all over the newspapers and social media.
You only have to read the comment sections of this site. Whenever something goes wrong there are always people screaming for blood.
Maybe if the hoards of ambulance office staff, many of whom are qualified medics went operational like every other service in the country, there might be more ambulances available. It’s gravy-train time for those staff whilst road staff are run ragged. Ours is the only service where office staff refuse to go on the road. Every other service in the country, ALL ambulance staff go on the road when it is busy. FACT.
What needs to be considered is the amount of bloody hoax calls.
Crews are tied up for hours dealing with these, hardly their fault.
I do not know about ambulance service medics being office bound but I do know from bitter recent experience that the Ambulance Service are funding Ryde Taxis to take people to A and E.
I waited 50 minutes for an ambulance and a Ryde Taxi eventually took me to hospital. The lady driver was great but is she paramedic trained. I had blacked out completely in Newport and I could well have blacked out again We are in dire straights folks. ….have no doubt about that. On arrival at hospital poor staff doing 18 hour shifts They were brilliant in any one’s book. No beds free though. They were struggling to find one for a young man who they needed to admit.
Sorry state of affairs
CSD is there to filter calls but they just find it easier to send an ambulance rather than do their job. Their default policy is send an ambulance. Although this will be changing soon as they’ve recently been found out.
IW Ambulance service used to be very good.
The last 5 years they have gone down hill, bit like St Mary’s
Last 35 for St Scarys.
I beg to differ. The only difference is now it’s all digital, they can no longer fake the response times like they used to.
Somebody came up with the bright idea of closing our Psychiatric hospitals & came up with Care in the Community ! ever since then & with the increasing amount of people coming here, everything gradually gets squeezed & the NHS was not designed for some of the complex needs of today.
I can only see things getting stretched, imagine if you were in America you would be paying big time for medical Insurance.
Why has my comments not here yet ?????
I think the NHS is amazing and all the workers need more credit. But earlier in the year my 96 year old grandad fell and broke his hip, he was on the floor for 7 hours waiting for an ambulance. This was unacceptable and I’m not sure I believe these statistics from my experiences. I am grateful to paramedics but as you can imagine this was not nice for our family and he is still suffering the effects from this. No longer mobile.