Monday 27 August 2018

Wales "Hanging on the Telephone"

The BBC report that  patient waited 62 hours for an by the Welsh Ambulance Service, which has by far the worst record in the UK needs a deeper investigation.
We really need to look at the circumstances  which shows that  The longest delays in the UK were recorded by Welsh Ambulance Service, which kept four patients waiting for more than 50 hours.
A spokesman said the figures were "not typical" and "represent the extreme end of the waiting time spectrum".
The Patients Association said they were "extremely concerning".
Between June 2017 and June 2018, ambulances from four services took 24 hours to reach patients, including some with breathing and mental health problems.
The trusts said the longest waits were for "less serious calls", and they had to prioritise responding to people in life-threatening or urgent conditions.
Most ambulance services also reported achieving the national target of responding to the most serious type of call in an average of eight minutes or less.

Chart showing longest waits for an ambulance

Lucy Watson, from the Patients Association, said: "Everybody should be getting the services that they need.
"We know that demand has gone up on all health services as our population is getting older, and we need to see the level of investment increasing so our ambulances can respond in a timely way."
To what extent the figures reflect how the various services operate a variant of  Triage (in medical use) the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties would be useful but distance and the availability of other forms of transport and whether GP or other medical visits do not seem to be a factor.
Stephen Clinton, assistant director of operations for Welsh Ambulance Service, said:
 "We fully accept that a number of patients waited far longer than anyone would like.
"That said, these figures represent the extreme end of the waiting time spectrum and are neither typical nor do they explain the circumstances of these individual cases."
He said in some of the cases the patients were already in the care of medical teams, and others were affected by extreme weather conditions.
The service did not provide details of the four patients who waited more than 50 hours.
But the longest three calls were in the second-most serious "amber" category, classified as "patients who may need treatment at scene or taking quickly to health facility".
The remaining call was rated "green", a classification used for "less urgent calls".
Equally worrying is that Tens of thousands of callers to the police non-emergency line have hung-up in frustration at long waiting times.
A total of 135,389 calls to Welsh police via 101 were abandoned or redirected last year - almost 14% of all calls.
Wendy Lewis, from Swansea, waited for 22 minutes while trying to get help for a young mother who was being harassed.
"In the end I gave up," she said. Police bosses said improvements had been made.
Introduced almost a decade ago, the 101 service is for reporting non-emergency incidents such as criminal damage or stolen vehicles.
But figures obtained by BBC Wales show that since 2013 the number of calls abandoned has risen across Wales' four police forces.
The highest rate of abandoned 101 calls was in the Gwent force area, where just over a fifth of calls - or more than 47,000 - were dropped before being answered in 2017.
There are no standard times for answering calls, with each force setting its own targets.
I suppose it is encouraging that people are using the 101 services rather than 999. but we should ask ourselves to what extent people are doing so because their local Police Station has closed or as in the case of one near to me kept open but closed to the public  and there's no "Desk Sargent" who you can approach with the sought of problems Wendy Lewis was trying to bring the police attention to.
As i said we need a real in depth investigation into the circumstances of what looks like a stark contrast with the rest of the UK. Are people elsewhere advised to to use public transport  for what is considered a "Green" case. 
All this doesn't help people who are already in distress and it is up to the Welsh Labour government to sort out, after all the UK Party leader Jeremy Corbyn , is all to ready criticise  the SNP government in Scotland despite it having a far superior response time to Wales.

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