"Waiting for an ambulance"

Thank you for taking the time to share your experience of using North West Ambulance Service through Healthwatch and Care Opinion. You raise concerns about the length of time it took for the ambulance to arrive and that you had to keep giving a medical history.

Please allow me to briefly explain how our system works when you find yourself having to dial 999. The system we use is a prioritisation system and helps us to place patients into a safe category of response. To enable us to do this our Emergency Medical Dispatchers (EMD’s) will ask a series of scripted questions to callers to elicit the most appropriate response. These categories of response have been decided at a national level by NHS England and further information on them can be found here:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/urgent-emergency-care/arp/

Without having the exact details of the call, from the outline that has been provided in this case, it suggests that the call priority would likely have been categorised as either an Urgent Category 3 or a Less Urgent Category 4 call.

Although the way calls are prioritised can depend on a number of factors, Category 3 calls tend to be for an emergency (not immediately life-threatening) or urgent condition that needs treatment to relieve suffering. This would apply to conditions such as burns (not major), falls, generally unwell and heart problems. Category 4 calls tend to be for urgent problems that require transport to an appropriate care facility or further clinical telephone assessment. This would apply to conditions such as stomach pain, back pain, falls and minor burns.

For Category 3 calls, we aim to respond 9 out of 10 times within 120 minutes and for Category 4 calls we aim to respond 9 out of 10 times within 180 minutes. In both cases, based on the information we have, it appears to be that we arrived within the response standard. However if there are any further concerns, we would need to look into this as a formal complaint to allow a thorough review of our processes.

In respect of being asked to repeat a patient’s medical history when re-dialling 999 the EMD’s would always verify if the patient’s condition had worsened and if they thought it had at any point then they would then commence re-triage of their current symptoms to ensure the incident is placed into a safe category of response.

I hope that this helps to explain some of the procedures that North West Ambulance Service follow however, as previously stated, if you still have concerns and would like us to look into this then please do not hesitate to contact our patient experience team. This can either be by phone on 0345 112 6500 between the hours of 10am-3pm Monday to Friday or by email: patient.experience@nwas.nhs.uk.